A Silly Season Upon Us?

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Tuesday May 31, 2011 · 4:08 AM PDT

2011/05/31 · 04:08

The supposed "scandal" related to Representative Anthony Weiner's Twitter account is allowing this rather outspoken congressperson's many enemies to try to give legs to something that fell apart almost as soon as it was attempted. This is where our politics has returned, to its low point in the early days of the Republic when the purpose was to trash, not to convince.

No one was fooled by this silly attempt to tar Weiner, not even his political enemies. Yet they are still trying to use it to tarnish his reputation.

AaronBa

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Wednesday May 18, 2011 · 12:55 PM PDT

2011/05/18 · 12:55

Newt Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler writes

But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Along Came Newt
(with sincerest apologies to Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and the members of the Coasters)

I plopped down in my easy chair and turned on Channel 3
A bad gunslinger called Bawdy Bill was chasin' our free country
He trapped her up on Capital Hill and said with an evil laugh,
"If you don't give me all of your cash
I'll saw you all in half!"
And then he grabbed her (and then)
He taxed her up (and then)
He turned up the welfare state (and then, and then...!)

AaronBa

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Thursday May 12, 2011 · 6:40 AM PDT

2011/05/12 · 06:40

The irony of Newt Gingrich's run for President doesn't lie in the fact that he has about as much chance of success as Donald Trump (that is, none at all), but that he continues to justify himself through an undergraduate--even adolescent--view of history. That he styles himself an intellectual and sports a PhD in history makes this rich.

AaronBa

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Tuesday May 10, 2011 · 8:50 AM PDT

2011/05/10 · 08:50

In her latest post on her Education Week blog "Bridging Differences," Diane Ravitch writes:

I worry about the one-sided treatment of education issues... in the national media. The corporate reformers seem shocked when anyone questions their narrative. They see no downside to their dogmatic belief in closing schools and firing principals and teachers, nor to their dogmatic faith that higher test scores are the goal of education. They accuse critics of "defending the status quo," even though it is they who are the status quo, the champions of get-tough accountability. They don't understand that they might be wrong, that their critics deserve a hearing, and that disagreement is healthy. ...

For many years, I kept a clipping in my wallet, something that [Robert Maynard] Hutchins said. It was the last line of his obituary in The New York Times (May 16, 1977). He said: "The only political dogma in America is that discussion leads to progress, that every man is entitled to his own opinions, and that we have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right."

AaronBa

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Sunday May 01, 2011 · 5:59 AM PDT

2011/05/01 · 05:59

Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari, in an otherwise excellent op-ed in today's New York Times, ignore one important question: Why do we, as Americans, so loathe our teachers?

Eggers and Calegari are right: we can turn around our schools, and can do so by renewing our faith in teachers, in providing them better and better training and real support in the schools, and by paying them adequately.

AaronBa

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Saturday April 30, 2011 · 3:56 AM PDT

2011/04/30 · 03:56

The cowardice of the drive-by shooter: Never put yourself at risk.

That's what Andrew Breitbart does.

With no responsibility to anyone, Breitbart can manipulate anything any way he wants, never caring that he will be caught, never caring who he hurts, for no one can do anything to him.

If they try, he can hide behind the shirts of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

AaronBa

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Sunday April 17, 2011 · 4:43 AM PDT

2011/04/17 · 04:43

At the start of "Good-bye, Teacher... " Fred Keller quotes one version of that old doggerel:

Good-bye scholars, good-bye school;
Good-bye teacher, darned old fool!

I learned it as:

Good-bye pencils, good-bye books;
Good-bye teachers' dirty looks.

It doesn't matter; the point's the same. We were glad to get rid of teachers, for the summer, at least.

We hated them. Or, at least, we thought we did. They repressed us, kept us quiet and indoors. Made us read and study. "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," we said.

AaronBa

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Wednesday March 09, 2011 · 5:46 PM PST

2011/03/09 · 17:46

We're surrounded by people whose basic philosophy seems to be "I've got something, at least, and I'm going to protect it at any cost! Keep away!" They remind me of lines by Aldous Huxley from Ape and Essence:

The leech's kiss,
The squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do I like the human race?
No, not much.
THIS MEANS YOU. KEEP OUT!

Dress it up in whatever religious piety you want, it still seems a rather squalid view of life.

Fortunately, if we look for them, we also find we are surrounded by people who are much, much better than that.

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Wordfacts

AaronBa

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Friday February 18, 2011 · 8:38 AM PST

2011/02/18 · 08:38

Writing in the September, 1960 of The Atlantic Monthly, John Kenneth Galbraith described the advent of the "wordfact":

The wordfact makes words a precise substitute for reality. This is an enormous convenience. It means that to say something exists is a substitute for its existence. And to say that something will happen is as good as having it happen. The saving in energy is nearly total.

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Copyright Duplicity

AaronBa

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Tuesday February 15, 2011 · 6:18 AM PST

2011/02/15 · 06:18

In today's The New York Times, Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro make the argument that copyright has provided the possibility for creativity for 300 years:

Copyright, now powerfully linking authors, the printing press (and later technologies) and the market, would prove to be one of history’s great public policy successes. Books would attract investment of authors’ labor and publishers’ capital on a colossal scale, and our libraries and bookstores would fill with works that educated and entertained a thriving nation. Our poets, playwrights, novelists, historians, biographers and musicians were all underwritten by copyright’s markets.

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Balance Bull: The Threats Are Real

AaronBa

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Saturday January 22, 2011 · 6:05 AM PST

2011/01/22 · 06:05

Last May, the Academic Freedom Committee (I am a member) of my union at the City University of New York (CUNY), drafted a resolution of support for Frances Fox Piven. The resolution reads, in part:

Whereas, Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, has been the object of unrelenting scurrilous attacks by Glenn Beck, David Horowitz, and others on the political extreme right; and...

AaronBa

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Tuesday January 11, 2011 · 2:40 AM PST

2011/01/11 · 02:40

In his column today, David Brooks diagnoses Jared Lee Loughner:

He appeared to have a poor sense of his own illness (part of a condition known as anosognosia). He had increasingly frequent run-ins with the police. In short, the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.

Maybe so... but, Mr. Brooks, maybe you do, too... 'have a poor sense' of your own 'illness,' that is.

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A Silly Season Upon Us?

Along Came Newt

The Gingrich Delusion

Discussing Education... Can We, Please?

But Why Do We Bash Teachers?

Drive-By Lying

"Good-bye, Teacher... "

One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo

Wordfacts

Copyright Duplicity

Balance Bull: The Threats Are Real

David Brooks's Anosognosia