News and Opinion from Kay

I have very strong views on education, especially music education.  I still keep in touch with some of the colleagues from the places at which I have taught, and it surprises me how concerned they are about education, especially their specific fields.  "Chemistry is being neglected," says a tenured chemistry professor, and "Math is not being taken seriously enough!" exclaims a tenured math professor, and "there's too much emphasis on everything except foreign languages" insists a tenured professor in modern languages.  Am I different because I agree with all of them--to some degree?  Clearly, colleges have now been put in the position of having to give kids a general education, to allow them to function in society.  (Grade school used to do this, but in those years kids are awfully busy being kids.)  This frantic competitiveness when it comes to the various disciplines within a school seems needlessly . . . I don't even know the word for it.  (It's fractious.  I had a brain fart.)  It is as if they have never heard the motto: United we stand, divided we fall!  We must all hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, or we will certainly be hung out to dry separately.  And who should know better that all subjects and disciplines should be given equal emphasis once those fields are introduced into the curriculum than college professors?  They seem to spend far too much time fretting about the stability of their jobs.

I think the central tragedy in our society today is the conviction that nothing is worth more than money.  We have grown up with people who have been preoccupied with material wealth for years, but somehow it never came to the point where it was all that mattered. Reputation, appearance, appearances (not the same thing), power, education, social standing, the public good, all these things mattered to some degree.  But a recent article about a Virginia economist called James Buchanan traces the roots of the economic and political strategy of the economic elite who mastermind the politics in Washington to this man.  He advocated not just the defeat of the welfare state, but the actual destruction of democracy.  Ayn Rand had a relatively sunny disposition, says the author of this piece, compared to Buchanan.  Reading it, one gets the conviction that Trump is merely a tool.

Well, as long as we're alive, we have to push back, and I have neither the inclination nor the training to contribute to the resistance which must take place.  But an important component to the upbringing of the sort of citizen who has a vision of the kind of world in which diversity and art and culture have a place is the proper education.

Whether we like it or not, our environment is educating our kids to believe that only money matters.  Well, our environment is mostly dominated by businesses.  What do we expect?  Money is the very blood of Business, so if we swim in a sea of business, money is inevitably the source of all energy.  Is this, I wonder, the origin of this panic-stricken urgency that so many on the Christian Right feel to proselytize everyone?  Well,  I have news for them: can't you see how your very evangelists have sold their souls to Mammon?  That is the fact that most makes me want to tear my hair out!  More than Trump, Christianity is a tool for this anti-Democratic cohort to dismantle the political philosophy of this, the longest-surviving constitutional democracy.

These Buchananites (as opposed to ordinary Libertarians, some of whom want extreme freedom in order to serve their fellow-man according to their own impulses--but, I'm convinced, not so these Buchananites) must go through life with the opposite of rose-colored spectacles; everywhere they look, they only see someone out to steal their money.

In Helen vs. Messiah, Marissa lies in bed, broken-hearted at the fact that Helen has retired from the concert stage, and apparently gone into a depressed funk.  Here's an excerpt --not the one I was looking for, which would have better illustrated how Marissa regarded Helen, but this will have to do:

Helen’s miraculous arrival a year and some months ago had made her life less of a disaster than it would have been.  In spite of all the heartbreaking obstacles Helen had been presented with, she had given Maryssa the strength to see the world as a place with possibilities, with kindness and friendship hidden behind its rough, harsh face.

That's the essence of it.  Just as Helen opened Marissa's eyes to see the world without being threatened by it, so education does the same for us.  An infant sees the world as its mother.  Then, as it grows older, and experiences its environment, a time comes--or could come--when all it sees is the rough, harsh face of the world.  If we cannot get beyond that intimidating facade, then we're fair game for those who see their environment--and I'm not talking about woods and streams here; I mean the world outside us--those who see the world as something to be mastered and dominated.  The recent history of the USA has this thread of exploitative domination running through it, and not in a happy way.

Those who aren't in sympathy with the aims of college education, see it as an opportunity for the wrong kind of people to indoctrinate innocent kids.  (If there are any college professors reading this: there are great dangers in trying to fight fire with fire, and indoctrination with indoctrination.)  What you can do is to present the basic interconnectedness of all things as something positive, and the world as something to be embraced and appreciated, rather than a hostile entity that needs to be put in a cage, and exploited for oneself (not even for the benefit of others among one's acquaintances).

That was exhausting to write; a thousand curses upon those who dream up these dreary theories which we must labor to address!  The rough harsh face of the world just looks a lot harsher today.
[more after the break:]

Well, having thought about these things some more, and read some more worrisome articles (and I'm well aware that there is a tiny possibility that the appearance of all these articles at this time just might not be a benign phenomenon, but we have to take these things and work them out for ourselves, trusting in our fellow-man until he reveals himself as untrustworthy!) I think I should make these ideas a little easier to grab.

One article (and this one could evaporate if someone takes it down) describes a probable influence of the so-called Virginia School (of economics) on the ultra-right-wing Koch brothers.  When I did a Google search, articles that were listed higher included a vigorous defense of the theories of James M. Buchanan (not to be confused with the 19th-century US President), who Nancy McLean, the author of Democracy in Chains puts forward as the theoretical source of the largely successful attack on Democracy whose figurehead is Trump, but whose engineers are the Kochs and the other libertarian 1%-ers.  Buchanan says that it is a foolish idea to believe that anyone elected to political office has altruistic motives.  Everyone acts in his or her own self-interest, he says.  This line of thinking concludes that the North wanted the South defeated, and did not want to allow it to secede, out of the economic necessity to destroy its power.

Now, I think it's probably true that many, or most, of the members of congress at that time feared the economic power of the southern states.  But I think it's equally likely that slavery was becoming increasingly an embarrassment, and the increasing numbers of relationships between whites and blacks simply could not support the notion that blacks were naturally and properly slaves and property.  Today, increasingly, we see that people in congress and in the senate are voting in their own self-interest.  But to claim that this is their only, or even their ruling, motive makes Democracy hopeless.  Lobbying makes self-interest increasingly against the public good, and even if restricting or forbidding Lobbying is a last-ditch way of encouraging Congress to work as it should, if there is no expectation of altruism in our elected leaders, then we have nothing.

Another article by one Thomas Friedman, connects our problems with BREXIT in Britain, the  immigration problems of Germany, the election of Macron in France, the trends towards conservatism and racism in Holland, and some political chaos in Italy.  These problems may not be directly connected by ideology flowing from conservative think-tanks in Virginia, but the author, Thomas Friedman, says that some slowly-changing effects have suddenly changed their nature, and together he calls them Climate Change.

Actual geographical climate change is just one factor, says Friedman.  The increasing digitization of everything is another, and the increasing globalization of the world economy is a third.  For instance, he says, it used to be that when the Chinese GNP changed, we would be happy.  But now, he says, if their stock market takes a small dip, many Americans could lose their jobs.  (Many US citizens, actually living in the USA, depend of the health of Chinese businesses for their own employment, says Friedman.)

It used to be that our thinking had been simple, for the last so many decades: North vs. South, East vs. West, US vs. Foreign, Business vs. Environment.  But now, it isn't so clear.  Every thing we have become accustomed to is splitting into smaller splinters: Democrat Moderates vs. Bernie Sanders far Left; Traditional Conservatives vs. Alt Right, etc.

Ordinary folks have been able to get along for a lifetime without thinking very hard about political choices.  But now, we're going to have to fight the oversimplified crap that the media feeds its viewers (and some of these ideas are hard for even TV announcers to explain), and recognize that simplistic slogans probably hide a nasty agenda, of which we must beware.  No matter how sincere a politician sounds, we're getting to understand that they vote first and foremost for themselves.  This is why political candidates go all out to show that they are just like us.  I used to laugh at that, thinking that they're probably not like us at all, and let's get on with the real information.  But now, it turns out that it is more than a joke; how a congressman or a state representative votes can become very immediately important.  I mean, it was always so, but it is no longer obvious that they will vote as they should, as we expect them to.  We have to expect them to say, almost every time, "Well, it's not so simple . . ."

Don't misunderstand me when I warn that our interdependence on the Chinese economy means that if their stock market goes even a few points lower, some of us may lose our jobs.  This may--or may not--mean that disengaging from their economy is a good thing, as Trump is trying to do.  Slapping tarriffs (import taxes) on Chinese goods is probably a reasonable thing, but a 25% tax is probably reckless.  But we must realize that when Americans lose their jobs Trump isn't necessarily upset.  Trump, for one, probably satisfies James Buchanan's description of someone who only acts in his own interest!

We must all read those articles, or at least get our trusted brainy friends to read them, because we need to know where the first attacks on democracy will come.  The GOP was worried about deficit spending.  Suddenly they're raising the debt level much higher than it had been.  That is very worrisome.  (Most of this debt is held in China, as far as I know.)  Are they going to declare that they're not going to pay?  Is this in fact an attack on the US democratic system?

We can only hope that enough of us can get our heads around this threat by election time; we may have lost the opportunity to select the best candidates to run for elections in November, but even our not-the-best candidates are probably more reasonable than those of Trump's (sort of) Party, whose Bible is Buchanan's cynical writings.

Kay