An Old Post-Election Post (from 2004)

The need for an authoritative narrative voice will compel most elements of the news media to quickly re-instate the status quo, and move as quickly as possible to a consensus on the outcome of the presidential election. Setting aside for the moment the possibility that differences between exit polls and election results might indicate the presence of fraud, technical failures, or both, and assuming that the vote accurately reflects the choice of the American electorate, it is neither accurate nor ethical to describe a 51% - 49% majority as some kind of mandate. 

Nevertheless, it is in news networks' and wire services’ best interest to simplify the results as quickly as possible, in order to “heal the nation” and “move on” (i.e. find a new story before the audience turns the channel). It is true that democracy is built on the principle of majority rule, and in 2004, it appears that Bush the Younger was the choice of slightly (2%) more voters than John Kerry. But it seems both naïve and negligent to presume without question that democratic contests should be “winner take all,” and in stepping to the next chapter of the Election Saga, newspeople in all media – by taking up the question of why the Democrats failed (losing the vote) rather than evidence of how they succeeded (marshalling the largest numbers of votes against a sitting President in history) – tell a story that betrays rather than reflects the democratic process.


Democracy in practice functions most effectively through compromise and coalition. One defender of the Electoral College indicated that this was a Constitutional mechanism for ensuring that regional coalitions – the states – would be guaranteed power and influence in a federal (i.e. nationally centralized) system. Multiple-party systems ensure that politicians must compromise in order to be effective (whereas two-party systems tend to encourage politicians to stonewall whenever they can claim a majority), which in turn ensures that a legitimate debate and discussion must take place in the operation of government. Most important, however, is the notion that representative government can lead to the construction of a collective consensus that legitimately reflects the dividing, converging, and overlapping opinions of the people. When genuine negotiation takes place among opposing viewpoints, each side must listen to and understand the grievances and desires of the other. Such a mechanism – upon which democracy is fundamentally based – can lead to the active construction of agreement based on understanding and dialogue.

What we have now, however, is an understanding of our own system that leads to the imposition or fabrication of consensus, not the building of it. No matter who won, media and political operatives alike (and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart) would prefer to simplify the story, because winners and losers are much easier to describe – in nice, clear, typically black-and-white terms – than shifting alliances and demographic variances. Take the red-state vs. blue-state dichotomy that the press now accepts as Gospel: the map invariably used to demonstrate what entire regions monolithically believe only shows who won, not the margin of victory. All of Ohio appears red (even on the county maps); but what if the map were weighted by population, and not by geography? An entirely different story would appear. But this level of complexity is hard to research, harder to explain, and probably (as a result) very hard to sell, at least for an industry that prefers tried methods over experimentation.


Just as exit pollsters simplified the entire landscape of ethics to an empty set (“moral values” – either a meaninglessly broad descriptor, or a code word for conservative Christian ethics), the story our press sells us is simplified by design from complex reality to clarified melodrama. In fact, reporting in the news industry tends to follow a basic commercial principle – keep the audience coming back for more. One of the simplest ways to do that is to promise more conflict. Unless you’re selling comedy, nuance is hard to market. But the actual goal of the democratic process is to resolve conflict by building mutual agreement. If you love democracy – a system that depends on active and informed discussion and debate – which is more important: the winner, or how the discussion led us (or can lead us) to future agreement rather than greater conflict? 

Our narratives are very powerful; our stories sometimes seem to be telling us. Given the extent to which the very means of telling stories – our media – are being seized from the public domain by private companies, perhaps this is the reason that I feel more and more as if American public discourse is becoming a dream, further and further detached from experience. Or perhaps I feel this way because – as a dreamer often feels carried by a dream, and unable to steer it – the story America seems to be telling itself is increasingly told with instruments beyond my control, and by storytellers it seems impossible to hold accountable.

Occupy Wall Street and the Plastic People of the Universe

Tom Stoppard's play Rock'n'Roll (2006) describes, among many other things, the importance of the Czechoslovakian rock band The Plastic People of the Universe to the Velvet Revolution, and its role in the resistance to totalitarian culture.

In this speech, Jan, a scholar whose love for (and collection of) Rock'n'Roll records draws the ongoing attention of the police, points out to his dissident friend Ferdinand why police hate rock music more than they hate dissidents:

Jan: Why do you think you're walking around and Jirous is in gaol?
Ferdinand: Because he insulted a secret policeman.

Jan: No, because the policeman insulted him.  About his hair.  Jirous doesn't cut his hair.  It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol.  But what is the policeman angry about?  What difference does long hair make? 

The policeman is angry about his fear.  The policeman's fear is what makes him angry.  He's frightened by indifference.  Jirous doesn't care.  He doesn't care enough even to cut his hair.  The policeman isn't frightened by dissidents!  Why should he be?  Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics.  Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith.  Nobody cares more than a heretic.  ... It means they're playing on the same board.  So [the man who pays the police] can relax, he's made the rules, it's his game.  The population plays the other way, by agreeing to be bribed by places at university, or an easy ride to work ... they care enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, their haircuts give nothing away. 

But the Plastics don't care at all.  They're unbribable.  They're coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from.  They're not heretics.  They're pagans.

Having worn long hair since I was 19, and hung out with neo-Pagans for about as long, I've found myself personally attached to this passage; but today, I find that it describes that quality which I've found familiar about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what distinguishes it from its predecessors. 

It's not so much that I think this describes the Occupations directly; it's that this approach to revolution parallels the problem so many have in trying to tell their story (and in so doing, claim some ownership over it).  Part of the point of the Plastic People of the Universe, as Jan puts it, is the audacity of existing at all, because their existence defies definition or delineation. 

It is the audacity of daring to occupy our public places and re-invent what public life means - to dare to live so differently in public - that irritates the skin of our American body politic, so attached to its master narratives and its narrow imagination. 

What Do We Mean By Education?

In a comment (below) Ellie said...

"But what do you do when your sutdents are minors and your questions conflict with a parent's right to teach a child *their* prefered wordview? Do you as a teacher still have an assumed right to ask your qustions and parental rights be dammed our do parental rights trump yours and put you under obligation to shut your mouth? Is your classroom under an obligation to answer to the parent and you as it's teacher obligated to a form a self control you may not internally agree with because a parent's rights to preference of worldview matter more than your right to speach?"

My first response to this is to note that the thinker perhaps most responsible for academic thought - Socrates - was executed for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth.

To put this another way (and rephrasing my initial post): Education necessarily (as I see it) is based on and driven by the process of asking questions. Education is what happens after a question is asked. I once heard that in certain Eastern traditions, a teacher does not begin instruction until the student requests it - meaning, in part, that instruction cannot begin until the student knows that she wants to learn, and knows how to ask to learn.

Which gets at an operating definition of education, which I think is grossly misunderstood and misrepresented in our society. We seem to think that education involves the IMPARTING OF FACTS - as though the young mind were an empty vessel, and the teacher's job to fill that vessel with the fruits of truth and wisdom. But my experience has been - and my belief remeains - that education involves the STIMULATION OF THOUGHT - that is, catalyzing the young mind to engage her environment critically, tactically, and reflectively in order to develop as a human being (and a citizen).

In the case where students are minors and parents wish to assert that their world view must be the view that is taught to their children, the root of the problem is not what is being taught, but what the very definition of TEACHING is. Parents who don't want their children in the habit of asking annoying questions are probably not interested in having their children genuinely educated (according to my definition of education, anyway). So the debate is really not over what gets taught in the classroom (i.e. we're debating the wrong issues in public discourse on education today). The debate really resides in a fundamental conflict over what a classroom is, ought to be, and should be doing.

My answer to your question would be to suggest that no, it is not your obligation to teach someone else's world view, any more than it is your right to teach your own. What a teacher, in my view, should first and foremost concentrate on teaching is helping a student realize the extent to which they are capable of (and responsible for) constructing and informing their own view of the world. (And for some, this process of empowerment is an inherently radical act. I see it as a basic act of human respect.)

Theater of Social Action

From Christopher Maurer's introduction to Three Plays... by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Carmen Zapata and Michael Dewell (NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993):

"... by 1935 Lorca had declared himself an 'enthusiastic, devoted follower of the theater of social action,' and defined theater as

a school of laughter and lamentation, an open tribunal where the people can introduce old and mistaken mores as evidence ... The theater is an extremely useful instrument for the edification of a country, and the barometer that measures its greatnesss or decline. A sensitive theater, well oriented in all its branches, from tragedy to vaudeville, can alter a people's sensitivity in just a few years, while a decadent theater where hooves have taken the place of wings can cheapen and lull to sleep an entire nation." (xii)

Such a definition does raise the question - in admirably poetic terms - as to which sort of theater we have in this country to work with. Have hooves taken the place of wings - or vice versa? And how can we tell which is which?

Theatre & Knowledge

"... in my view the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding."

~ Bertolt Brecht

Pirate's Suggestion for Katrina Survivors

Fellow blogger Pirate has made a suggestion that we, the people, utilize closed military bases as potential housing sites for folks dislocated by the damage from Hurrican Katrina. While his proposal is far from modest - and somewhat problematic - it seemed a civilized thing to do to provide this link to his site and the discussion ensuing there.

5th Grade Reading Levels

Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto writes, in "Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education,"

In 1882, fifth-graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.

In 1995, a student-teacher of fifth-graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

Gatto's article appears in Everything You Know is Wrong, published by Barnes & Noble Books.