Welcome to TWLTW, an opportunity to value the random and planned things we have learned in the last week, approximately.
I've been seeing a lot of changes around campus this week. In fact, so many changes, and in so many places, that I had to wonder if they were in some odd way connected. Or, maybe, not so oddly.
We have a habit around Morning Feature mornings to talk about and assume the long now when it comes to legislative change and governance (ex: Civil Rights changes took a lot longer to come about than we as a populace tend to think in hindsight because we live with the results, not the struggle, today). So, when we struggle with changes like DADT and the move away from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, it feels like real change will never come. Hopefully, for our children and beyond, it will later feel like it must have taken 5 minutes to make those changes rather than 5 years. Or 50.
So, what I learned this week is that change happens.
48 Years Apart
A private all-girls Catholic high school in New York currently offers this course to its junior and senior students:
English 12: “The Use of Force”: Power and Authority (AP Option)
Issues of power and authority are pervasive in governments, schools, and personal relationships. As citizens, students, daugh- ters, and friends, we are constantly asking the same question: “Who is in charge?” As readers, we can contemplate the intricacy of this question by examining other characters’ lives. One may wonder: is authority a function of gender/ age/ class/ ethnicity? How does one gain control, and how does one lose it? Moreover, what is the fundamental appeal of power? In this course, we will consider narratives of both large-scale conflicts and more intimate ones. Texts will likely include: Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wiesel’s Night, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Walker’s The Color Purple, Nabokov’s Lolita, Williams’ “The Use of Force,” Barthelme’s “School,” Carver’s “Cathedral,” Valenzuela’s “The Censors,” and Shepard’s “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian.” There is an AP option in this course.
Bonus points to anyone who has read 2 or more of the above titles. Make that 3 or more, this is a pretty well-read crowd, I suspect!
In 1962, Herb Block, political cartoonist extraordinaire published this statement on how slowly change takes place, in the context of the very issues of power and questions of "Who is in charge" asked about in the class above:
Caption (above the image): "I'm eight. I was born on the day of the Supreme Court decision."
I have no idea if Brearley uses this cartoon in teaching that class. Probably not. I found them in two completely different sources, myself. But, I also found that the 48 years that separate that cartoon from the above course description, a course taken by a racially and socioeconomically diverse student body of young girls, in some ways is a very long time, and in others, a very short span indeed.
6 Catholics and 3 Jews
The NYT a few days ago pointed out that should Elena Kagan be seated on the Supreme Court that it would be comprised, for the first time, of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews. They applaud the idea that this nominee's religion is not that big of a deal for those considering her approval or disapproval. That we have moved past the days of thinking about the "Catholic-seat" on the court and now don't consider religious affiliation as an impediment to judicial service is a good thing, according to this article.
But, it made me wonder, "Really?"
From the critical theory perspective, that Catholics and Jews have filled the court is not necessarily evidence of religion no longer being an impediment. What if Elena Kagan was Muslim? Or Mormon? Or any other of a host of underrepresented religions in the American judiciary? Would such status hurt her nomination, help it, or be nomination-neutral, as suggested by the Times author's celebration of our soon to be Catholic/Jewish Supreme Court demographic? I have to wonder, and I may even suspect, that we are not having a national discussion of the last few Court nominee's religious identities because these particular identities benefit from the long now of decades and decades of anti-discrimination efforts and events that have contributed to their being accepted by American power structures. That others have not warns me that the thesis of this article is, perhaps, flawed.
That same article goes on to claim the "decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph." As "the ethnic group that opened its doors to all," exemplified by Protestant controlled Princeton deciding to allow urban minorities to apply for admission in the 1960's. That the last 3 Supreme Court nominees (Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan) are Princeton graduates is evidence that the social mores White Protestants held as standards- equality, liberty, and meritocracy- have overcome the conditions of their American origins in creating a more diverse and power-shared Democracy. The article ends with a claim that we all have our Protestant forebears to thank for the diversity of today's Court. Or, as author Professor Feldman (Harvard Law) writes:
The spread of Ivy League style is therefore not a frivolous matter. Today the wearing of the tweed is not anachronism or assimilation, but a mark of respect for the distinctive ethnic group that opened its doors to all...
I encourage you to read that article (it's very short, actually) and see if you're interpretation aligns with mine. And mine is fairly critical. For example, it doesn't mention that Princeton didn't open it's doors to women until 1969, years after men of all colors had been accepted by Princeton's powers that were. By comparison, the non-Ivy University of Georgia admitted Charlayne Hunter-Gault in 1962, 7 years earlier than Princeton's conversion to co-education in general.
In any case, despite my distaste for the op-ed in question, I will submit it as an example of the distortion of time on our thinking about the achievement of significant social change. There are others.
4 Shows and 12 Tickets
There have been 4 Broadway shows this season that have marketed themselves directly to African American audiences: Fela!, Memphis, Fences, and Race. Two of these were nominated for Best Musical, and one of these won the Tony for Best Musical. One of these won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play, and it's two leads won in their acting categories.
Memphis, before opening on Broadway had a tagline that read, "The Birth Of Rock-n-Roll." It was road-tested in front of a focus group of 12 African American women. They thought it was a show about Elvis.
I've always had a problem with Elvis. Elvis this, and Elvis that, and my mom was a big Elvis fan in her youth (her gaze drifted up and to the left every time she described seeing him swivel his hips on my grandfather's 9" black and white tv that sat on top of the refrigerator). After his death she collected albums from a variety of performers who reminded her of Elvis.
I've always wanted there to be greater recognition and respect for the African American musicians who had been doing what Elvis did before he started doing it. I guess my problem isn't really with Elvis. It's with the attribution made by others that Elvis invented or created something that he borrowed from others who had been doing it for years, under cover of darkness. Yes, Elvis caused a sensation with the hip swivels, but he was White. Imagine what a...we don't have to imagine. We know what happened to many Black men and boys who were accused of having done less.
There is a Broadway show starring Elvis (or at least an impersonator) right now, anyway, and it isn't Memphis.
The producers of Memphis changed the tagline to, "Memphis: His Vision, Her Voice. The Birth of Rock'n'Roll." This, apparently, much better gets across the message that the show is about a White deejay and Black R&B singer whose personal relationship kickstarts the Rock era when he insists on playing her music on the air. That's the story that the women in the focus group wanted to see, and it's the one that went on to win the Tony.
The Long Now
The first African American students to attend the University of Georgia now have a building on campus named after them.
Autherine Lucy, the first African American student at the University of Alabama was barred from campus by the Board of Trustees in 1956. She was expelled a year later for having defamed the university by suing it for violating her civil rights by denying her entry to class by "failing to provide a safe environment." Her portrait now hangs in that campus' Ferguson Center. She wasn't awarded her degree until 1992. It was in elementary education.
These are appropriate and wholly earned honors, and address the gap in national memory that I fear persists concerning other areas of African American heritage (see Elvis, above) and the contributions non-White people have made not only to the history of the United States, but to it's present. The Texas textbooks scare the red clay right out of me for this reason. The organized and concerted effort to create the very memory gap that I deride in this essay is alive and well, and we don't have to go very far to find it. (Teabag people, guess who I'm talking about?)
As I heard reports of the passing of Robert Byrd this week I, for some reason, immediately thought of reports of the United States becoming minority White in the next few decades. That there are increasingly few people with the perspective and sense of the long now that Robert Byrd possessed among his peers in the Senate. His conversion from KKK member to Barack Obama supporter, and from Viet Nam supporter to staunch opponent of the Iraq war, are not best understood under today's context of the "most expedient position to take this week" politics we are witnessing in the likes of Arlen Specter, John McCain, and others. Those who have allowed their sense of the "right now" to eclipse their sense of the long now do a disservice to the past, the present and the future.
The loss of that institutional, and national, memory is a great loss indeed.
TWLTW
- Bamboo is a grass. I don't know that I ever thought about it, but it kind of surprised me nonetheless.
- A visually rich photo album of Hindu Sadhus (ascetic holy men) in Nepal.
- The earliest evidence of Italian castrati is from court documents in 1555, nearly the same time as the legal appearance of primogeniture in Europe, or the inheritance of a father's estate by an eldest son. Apparently, castrati were mostly younger sons who stood no chance of inheriting a living from a father's estate.
- An Asian Carp was found 6 miles past the electric fences designed to keep them out of the Great Lakes this week. The marauding Asian Carp can grow to 4 feet, 100 pounds, and could decimate the $7 billion Great Lakes sport fishing industry if allowed to flourish.
- Verizon is allowing anyone with a service contract that expires before January 1st, 2011, to upgrade to the new Motorola Droid X before their contract expiration date. So, if you're interested in the latest iPhone killer-wannabe, and you have a contract that expires in October or November, now you don't have to wait to get the newest and latest phone. BTW, it has a larger screen than the iPhone and an 8 megapixel HD camera (the iPhone 4's camera is 5 megapixels).
- During the Isner-Mahut 11+ hour mega-match at Wimbledon this week, a London based betting house offered 100-1 odds that the umpire would fall asleep in the chair.
- Bad News Alert: Don't read this one if your mood is fragile. Really. 3 people have either been killed or seriously injured by falling tree branches in Central Park this year. A 6 month old child was the latest, on Saturday, struck by a large tree branch near the entrance of the Central Park Zoo while being held by her mother while both were being photographed by her father. I'm not sharing this to depress anyone, but to call to mind how precious every moment we share with our loved ones is. On a maybe-related note, more than 500 trees were damaged in Central Park last August during a 30 minute thunderstorm in a section of the park called the Great Hill (near the Great Lawn). 100 trees have been replaced, and the Hill itself is fenced off from public access. I take Lil' C. to the park 3-5 times a month, and we spent 3 hours there Saturday morning ourselves, dancing and playing with the American Ballet Theater near the Great Hill. I'm trying not to question or second-guess that decision now that I've read that article, but I'm wondering to myself if our park-time is about to be voluntarily reduced by me.
- Now, for all those (including me) who are bummed out by that last item, a few news sites that offer only positive, uplifting, and better-mood news items (yes, these exist and they are for-real!):
- Happy News
- Only Positive News
- Good Mood News
- Not only have several subway lines, and many, many bus routes, been mothballed earlier this week, stalwart vehicles of New Yorkers and visitors to New York, the Ford Crown Victoria (yellow cabs everywhere) and Lincoln Town Car (black sedans that scream "I'm important and have a driver") are due to be discontinued early next year.
- And on a related note, Tesla Motors is having an IPO this week. Maker of a very curvy electric sports car, the shares were windowed at $14 to $16 each, and actually debuted at $17. They also increased from 11.1 million offered to 13.3 million.
- "I have served with Presidents, not under them." -Robert C. Byrd
What Did You Learn This Week?