From our Mailbag 09/09/03 - 09/20/03




by YOU

THE WORLD - From Darryl C., Jenkinstown, PA, USA:

Subject: Your Troubles

I'm sorry to read of your troubles with the law. ÝI think you are extremely hardheaded, Rod, and it is costing you a great deal. ÝDo you recall that I urged you to take the job in Boston just so that you could earn some ducats and you refused. I urged you to get out of Baltimore and you gave one excuse after another for staying there until I had to literally take you away. I also begged you to get out of New Orleans long before this legal shit came down. Do you realize that you live in a town where the cops can make you disappear and nobody except your momma will give a shit? I'm sorry that you¼re going through this nonsense but a hard head makes a soft behind. ÝBest of luck, Rod. -- Darryl C.


ROD RESPONDS: Part of my public life ("People who live in glass houses...") is being open to public criticism. I welcome it in my own way.

But a leopard can't change its spots. I'm hardwired the way I am and constantly remind myself that no one will share my coffin.


From Logan B., Rome, ITALY:

Dear Rod

I hope yesterday turned out OK, and I'm sorry that in the land of the free and home of the brave such awful things happen just because of the color of your skin. I'm also sorry that if liquor and cigarettes (both addictive) are sold legally, why the country has gone to the point of incarcerating people because of drugs. And where the class system permits people like our president (I say our with reservations) to skip his mandatory annual national guard pilot's exam the first year the Air Force tests for dope. (The related papers are on the web, he just never showed up, and never even resigned his commission as far as I can tell)

baci from rome,
logan

refuge for
people who think

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From Tony W., (No City Provided), USA:

SUBJECT: Re: Matthew Hale Interview

I was just reading your interview with Matthew Hale after the Ben Smith shooting spree. I was wondering if it would be ok to use some of his statements? I have been writing stories about Hale and his group for sometime now, pretty much disproving everything they say and do with the cold hard truth. If you go to www.onepeoplesproject.com you can check out my material. Take note, I do not hold myself out to be a real writer by any means, I just want the truth out there.

Some of what he says totally goes against things he has sworn to in court documents.

Hope to hear from you soon,
Tony W.


ROD RESPONDS: Tony,

Thanks for visiting G21 and for writing! It's appreciated. Feel free to use any of Hale's statements you'd like.

Regards,
Rod


Forwarded by Ric W., Austin, TX, USA:

"Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash"
By Luciana Bohne

You might think that reading about a Podunk University's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we've embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.

"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than philosophy -she thinks.

The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.

Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny.

Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.

Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our youth.

But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.

Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.

Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state - including education.

Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

From Bill P., Oakland, CA, USA:

SUBJECT: Letter to the Secretary of State

Rod

Sent this to Powell today:

Dear Secretary Powell,

As a man of honor it is your duty to uphold the oath of office you have sworn as a military & civilian officer of the United States; it is time for you to demonstrate your loyalty to our nation rather than an Executive branch that uses propaganda as a true weapon of mass deception. A man of integrity would never support their lies. It takes true courage to admit our mistakes and do the right thing. You must tell the truth about Iraq once and for all. History will be the final arbiter of character: How will it judge you?

William P.

Do with it as you like

Bill


ROD RESPONDS: You are putting yourself on the Ashcroft List, my friend. Be Careful.

Hope you're doing well.

Rod

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