Lord Help the Sister Who Comes Between Me and My Man

Speaking of homosexuals, Brent Bozell, a Buckley-nephew-by-marriage and right-wing media watchdog, recently warned (via) his readers that homosexuals are spreading their propaganda on the TV to suck America's teenagers into the gay lifestyle. His first target is Glee, of course, and Entertainment Weekly magazine for putting Glee's gay male characters on its cover.

Gay "Glee" actor Chris Colfer and his boyfriend on the show, Darren Criss, lovingly put their heads together on the cover.

I just realized that Bozell slipped significantly here: "lovingly"? Maybe he intended it as sarcasm. Decent people know that homosexuals don't love each other, we only feel degrading, degraded lust. That should have read "lustfully put their heads together on the cover." Better get your act together, Brent: you can be replaced with someone who'll toe the party line more consistently.

Colfer just won a Golden Globe for his part, which is another way the Hollywood press rewards propagandizing the youth of America. In his acceptance speech, he lamented anyone who would say a discouraging word about teen homosexuality, somehow putting all of those words in mouths of bullies: "Screw that, kids!"

Their most controversial scene was the two private-school boys singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to each other on the Fox show. "That was the gayest thing that has ever been on TV, period, " Colfer boasted. The magazine touted this was the hottest-selling track on the "Glee" Christmas album, which gives you a flavor of Hollywood's reverence for that holy day.

(Wow, that's badly written.) If this is true, then it's not just Hollywood that lacks reverence, but TV audiences, or at least Glee fans, for being so eager to buy this gay teen propaganda. But Hollywood's lack of reverence for "that holy day" is nothing new. Anyone else remember Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye's "Sisters" semi-drag duet in White Christmas? "Baby It's Cold Outside" has nothing to do with Christmas, but neither do many popular winter songs that are part of the holiday marketing blitz. If Lea Michele and Cory Monteith had sung "Winter Wonderland" and the song had been included on the Glee Christmas album, I doubt you'd have heard a word of complaint about it from Bozell.

From what I've seen (I just finished watching the first season on DVD), Glee is hardly a commercial for gay teens, at least in the sense that Bozell means. He wants you to believe that watching Kurt Hummel get thrown into a trash dumpster, receive death threats on the telephone, and suffer the throes of unrequited love will make young heterosexuals want to turn gay.

So, in what sense could Glee be called "gay teen propaganda"? From the viewpoint of antigay propagandists like Bozell, any depiction of gay people is propaganda. Back in the good old days of Hollywood's Production Code, it was forbidden to mention homosexuality, along with a slew of other topics. Radclyffe Hall's notorious but classic 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which ends with the tormented heroine driving her girlfriend into the arms of a straight man for her own good, and then shaking her fist at Heaven, was banned for being too positive, for implying that such degenerates found even transient solace in each other's arms. Antigay propagandists object even to such cries for pity and sympathy, which is basically what Glee is about, seventy-odd years after Radclyffe Hall.

When you understand this, you see what a rear-guard action people like Bozell are fighting. Like Rick Warren holding the line against same-sex marriage but waffling (at least publicly) on civil unions and hospital visitation, Bozell writes as though it's enough to keep gay characters out of mass media. "They are not celebrating diversity. They are intimidating dissidents," he complains.

As you might suspect, Entertainment Weekly didn't plan to debate gay teen propaganda, but to encourage it, energetically. Not a single soul had anything critical to say. Not even a question. If this magazine weren't so earnestly in the tank, the story could come with a disclaimer: "This issue is an advertisement bought and paid for by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation."

That's too bad. I'd love to debate "gay teen propaganda" with Brent Bozell. It's funny to see how low Bozell's standards for "debate" are: apparently even a single quotation from "a single soul," perhaps a spokesperson for some right-wing Christian group, would suffice. I expect more, myself.

But that's the normal form of journalistic balance in the US: every non-Right position must be "balanced" by quoting a Right spokesperson. Not the other way around, though. Our student newspaper, for example, can't run an article on atheism without including a quotation from a Christian minister deploring unbelief and endorsing Christian faith. I have never seen an article on religion that included a balancing quotation from an atheist. I once wrote them a letter pointing this out, and offering myself as a resource for future articles on religion; never heard back from them, though. When I wrote a column on gay parenting for the same paper, criticizing the Christian-Right group Focus on the Family, the paper printed a response from their spokeswoman, deploring my closed-minded criticism but not even trying to answer it.

Now, I don't favor the intimidation of dissidents, not least because I'm a dissident myself. But Bozell appears to be one of those people who consider any disagreement with their beliefs to be intimidation. And that's what makes me uneasy, because it's something he has in common with so many of his opponents.

Comma Comma Comma Comma Come On ...

Someone else noticed Kim Brooks's ign'ant Salon post on our youth's inability to write, namely Dennis Baron at the Web of Language. His take on the matter is a real treat:

As for comma misuse, well, just look no further than the United States Constitution. Originalists see every word and punctuation mark of that founding document as evidence of the Framers’ intent. Constitutional commas set off syntactic units or separate items in a list, just as we do today (though don’t look for consistency of punctuation in the Constitution: sometimes there’s a comma before the last item in a list, and sometimes there isn’t). But what does the good-writers-understand-commas crowd make of the fact that the Framers and their eighteenth-century peers also used commas to indicate pauses for breath, to cover up drips from the quill pens they used for writing, or like some college students today, for no apparent reason at all?

Baron gives plenty of examples, and notes that Ms. Brooks would also have to red-pencil much of the Constitution for spelling "errors" (chuse for choose), pronoun disagreement, erratic capitalization, and (horrors!) it's for its. Article I, Section 9:

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws.

No wonder we're falling behind the Chinese, with Founding Fathers who didn't know how to write English, the very bedrock of knowing how to communicate with others!

The comments, with Baron's responses, are worth reading too.

A Great Day to Be Indigenous

There was outrage in Native American circles (and others) recently when it was learned that the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden was codenamed "Operation Geronimo."

BoingBoing reported:

Even the NYT's account would appear to have inaccuracies now: They report that "Geronimo" was code name for bin Laden, but CNN cites an administration official later clarifying that this was the code name for the operation, not the man himself.

Oh, well! That's all right then. But it didn't appease the administration's critics. An LA Times op-ed agreed:

Present-day Native American leaders have rightly objected to the implied comparison between Geronimo and Bin Laden. As Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe noted in a letter to President Obama, "to equate Geronimo … with Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer and cowardly terrorist, is painful and offensive to our tribe and to all native Americans." No religious fundamentalist, Geronimo never sought to create an all-encompassing caliphate. Rather, he simply wanted to be left alone.

(Geronimo as Greta Garbo -- I like it.) I'm not defending the mission's title, I only want to suggest that Native American critics should treat it as a salutary reminder of the history that they seem to be trying to forget as fiercely as any other Americans. The op-ed drew on an article by Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University, who wrote:

The appropriation of Indian labels is particularly unseemly given the reality of today's military. Native Americans have one of the highest per capita enlistment rates in the military of any ethnic group. Powwows often begin with the entering of an honor guard, composed of military veterans who carry the U.S. and tribal flags. At the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona, where Geronimo was confined in the 1870s and '80s, the tribal government maintains a billboard proudly listing all the San Carlos Apaches serving in the military.

It's no wonder that Indian peoples feel their sacrifices have been dishonored by the labeling of our worst enemy as Geronimo and that they themselves have been treated as other than real Americans. As Guyaalé's great-grandson, Joseph Geronimo, noted recently, using the name in the operation to kill Bin Laden was a "slap in the face." His ancestor, after all, "was more American than anybody else."

Kaplan acknowledges "the 1939 movie 'Geronimo,' (a film advertised at the time as featuring images of 'war-maddened savages terrorizing the West')". Whatever the reality of Geronimo's career, that's how he was long seen in white American culture. The US military still uses the term "Indian country" to refer to "enemy territory"; the usage is apparently of Vietnam-war vintage, but survives in Iraq. (A Marine general's use of the term in 2003 also aroused controversy and hand-wringing.) In the American military imaginary, they're still fighting the Indian wars.

The Indian wars are reckoned to have ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886, though, so I guess it's not too surprising that many Native Americans now want to see and present themselves as patriotic Americans. But I can only go along with that wish so far. If Native Americans want to overlook their past sufferings at the hands of the US Government they are now so proud to serve, so be it; it's their choice. There's another inseparable side of that story, though: it means supporting, endorsing, and participating in the present crimes of the US. Which is not okay.

This morning I was listening to the Native American music program on my local community radio station. Today's installment was dedicated to Memorial Day, and between songs I vaguely heard references to "defending our country." Then they played a song called "She's My Hero", by Radmilla Cody, a tribute to Lori Piestewa, described on Cody's label's website as "the first Native woman to die in the Iraq war". (Well, no. "Native" in Iraq would mean "Iraqi," and I'm sure that many native Iraqi women were victims of our invasion before Piestewa was killed. This is another indication why "Native" is not a suitable label for the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. But that's another issue.) I listened more closely to the words as the song played:

Her name was Lori
synonymous with Glory
she answered her country's call
she did it for us all
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The price that she paid
the sacrifice she made
There's peace all around us
embraces all Americans
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The CD's liner notes describe Piestewa as "the first Native American woman warrior to die in battle protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America." So few words, so many lies. Piestewa wasn't a warrior, she was (according to Wikipedia) "a member of the army's 507th Army Maintenance Company, a support unit of clerks, cooks, and repair personnel." An Iraqi in an analogous position could have ended up in Abu Ghraib or Bagram.

Far from "protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America", Piestewa was a participant in an illegal and horrific war of aggression against people who had not attacked the US. Even if she was, according to Jessica Lynch (who was injured in the same ambush -- remember her?), "the true hero" of the debacle, and even if Lynch named her daughter "Dakota Ann" (?) in Piestewa's honor, and even if "Her death led to a rare joint prayer gathering between members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes, which have had a centuries-old rivalry," what she was doing in Iraq should not be whitewashed. It had better be possible to sympathize with her and her family's loss without obscuring this reality. I am sorry Piestewa died, but she didn't do it "for us all." Not for me, and not for you either.

"There's peace all around us"? The song and the program's content were especially outrageous coming on the heels of this (via) defense of America and our freedoms:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

As Glenn Greenwald commented,

Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

When I hear about women warriors (or any others) proudly hearing their country's call and defending us all, I can only think of "heroic" exploits like that one. There've been so many.

Taught to the Tune of a Hickory Stick

The Facebook friend (he's also a blogger) who'd linked to Kim Brooks's article, sent me e-mail today. Among other things he wrote:

I think for example that sentence diagramming of the parts of speech is helpful, up to a point. I think, or at least hope, that my grammar is pretty decent even if I never fully grasped the various definitions of different kinds of participles, and so forth. but as I don't have kids or know that much about what schools are actually doing nowadays, and I must admit I regard as suspect a lot of elite journalism blather about these kids these days, etc, like the fuss about that documentary that came out last year about charter schools (which I haven't seen, but it sure sounded like agit-prop advocacy for spending less on poor-district schools and union-busting).

I don't have kids either, but I learn something of what schools are doing nowadays by reading writers on education. (And by asking younger acquaintances about their experience.) What I read indicates that standardized testing has invaded schools to the extent that less and less time is available for kids to learn. This will lead to lower scores on the tests, which will lead to demands for more "accountability" and more testing, which in turn will lead to lower scores. Lower scores wouldn't be such a problem, since the scores are meaningless in themselves, but the emphasis on tests and the time wasted on preparing for and taking them will mean that students won't have time to learn. In short, the current demands for accountability, standards, and so on are a self-fulfilling prophecy, at the expense of children.

My friend, by the way, was referring to the recent documentary Waiting for Superman, which I haven't seen yet. I still mean to see it, but from reviews and interviews with the filmmaker I gather that it's based on the belief that American students compare spectacularly badly with their counterparts in other countries. Since this is false, the film's recommendations of charter schools and union-busting are irrelevant at best.

My friend also misunderstood what I'd written in my comments on Facebook. He thought that when I'd said "traditional methods of teaching don't work, for a variety of reasons", I was talking about "how students in poorer districts do in our inequitable system." While our system is inequitable, and students in poorer districts are poorly served by their schools, I was talking about all students who are schooled by traditional methods. (See John Holt's How Children Fail, based on his experience teaching in good private schools. His point wasn't that rich kids have it tough too, but that many of the faults in traditional schooling are built into the system.)

I write as one who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and went to small rural and small-town schools. After three townships were consolidated, my high-school graduating class had about 95 students in it. I remember taking standardized tests, mandated by the state of Indiana, starting in the fifth and sixth grades. For me they were a break from school routine, and I actually enjoyed taking them and (therefore?) did well on them. I did well on the SAT, too, when it came time to take it, and on other tests required for college-bound students. I was lucky: I did my required schoolwork pretty easily and quickly, so I had time to read my way through our school libraries, teaching myself the literary modernists among other writers, and using my self-taught typing skills on the school's IBM Selectrics to write during one of my study-hall periods when I wasn't studying French, Spanish, algebra, geometry, and so on. Oh, and watching TV and teaching myself to play guitar while discovering the new wave of American and British pop music along with European and American art music from the public library's lp collection. My math and foreign-language teachers taught me subjects I couldn't have taught myself, and I'm grateful to them. But most other subjects I learned on my own, because I wanted to. That's the ultimate aim of education, I thought, to prepare students to educate themselves.

In yesterday's post I wrote that I considered diagramming sentences "fun, for awhile anyway." But that reflects my own intellectuality and geekhood. When I was taking high-school Spanish, I used to recite verb conjugations as I rode around on my bicycle: trabajo, trabajas, trabaja; trabajamos, trabajais, trabajan. Much later, when I was studying Russian at IU in my thirties, my first-year instructor (a graduate student, and one of the best teachers I've ever had -- thanks, Becky!) apologized for the emphasis on grammar and structural analysis in the course; I told her that I liked those aspects of the class, because they helped me learn. For many people learning new languages as adults, immersion with a minimum of grammar is the best way to learn; but I (and I suppose others) think of grammar variously as being like a handhold, training wheels on a bicycle, a crutch, or a map: a means of guiding / supporting myself as I negotiate a new and strange territory. Students should have access to different tools and aids so that they can figure out what works best for them.

Elementary-school instruction in children's native language is different. They come to school with their spoken language already largely learned, with reading and writing to be learned as additional skills. One reason I have trouble reading Korean, I think, even though hangul is a phonetic alphabet, is that I don't know what the words I'm reading mean. Even in Spanish and Russian the words were familiar, if at times deceptively so. Learning to read English, however, meant dealing with words I already knew. Written language is not exactly the same as spoken language, but speech is a bedrock / a map / a handhold / training wheels for learning to write.

What angered me about the other commenter's remarks about traditional English grammar instruction was not that she argued for (say) diagramming sentences as one way among others of learning to write -- she claimed, dogmatically and incorrectly, that it was the only way to learn how to write well. Since yesterday I've had time to check what I thought I remembered about the effects of traditional instruction. It's well summed up by this passage in Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pages 225-6.

Grammar instruction provides a spectacular lesson on how old-fashioned dogma continues to drive beliefs and practices in direct contradiction to scientific findings. In the mid-1970s, a group of New Zealand researchers reviewed the available literature and wrote that "sixty years of empirical studies on the practical value of teaching grammar have failed to demonstrate any consistent measurable effects on students' writing skills." Nevertheless, they set out to design a test of their own, dividing 164 secondary school students into three carefully matched groups and exposing them to traditional grammar instruction, to a new "transformational grammar" curriculum, or to a course that just used the grammar time for more reading and creative writing. Three teachers rotated through each approach, so each group of students was exposed to all three teachers doing the same kind of instruction. At the end of three years, there were virtually no differences among the groups, which is to say there were no measurable benefits of traditional grammar instruction.

Returning to the question in 1991, two U.S. scholars contributed a definitive chapter to a research handbook published by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. They found absolutely nothing to challenge the New Zealanders' conclusion. Indeed, a meta-analysis performed by one of the authors a few years earlier had discovered that students studying grammar actually did worse than their peers on some measures, raising the possibility that almost "any focus of instruction is more effective in improving the quality of writing than grammar and mechanics." The major question suggested by all the data was why grammar retains its appeal "when research over the past 90 years reveals not only that students do not learn it and are hostile toward it, but that the study of grammar has no impact on writing quality." The best answer they could come up with is that grammar is easy to teach, easy to grade, and "provides security in having 'right' answers." The grammar sections of a textbook should be used as a reference tool, they concluded, and not as a course of study.

This is important, because traditionalists usually attack advocates of other approaches to teaching as hostile to "excellence," as wanting students to "feel good about themselves" rather than to learn, and so on. In reality, it's the traditionalists who favor approaches that, at best, contribute nothing to students' learning, and may actively hamper it. (They also think that insulting students who don't do so well with traditional methods will somehow inspire them to "excellence.") Students like me, who are able to teach ourselves how to read and write, may escape the worst effects of traditional methods, but what about the majority, who end up avoiding reading and writing, and regard writing in particular as a mysterious chore, unable to express themselves except by cutting and pasting other people's status messages on Facebook?

Our Ms. Brooks

I'd hoped that my switch to early hours (not my idea!) would enable me to get more done in the the afternoons and evenings. No such luck. I have been reading, but not writing. (On the other hand, I'm told that Blogger had a li'l' crisis yesterday, so even if I'd posted something it might have disappeared for a while. But I haven't posted anything since Tuesday anyway.)

There was a really fatuous essay on Salon this past Tuesday that I've been meaning to address. It was titled "Death to High School English" (and I realize that the titles aren't the work of the writers), with the subhead, "My college students don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay. Is it time to rethink how we teach?" Well, rethinking how we teach might not be such a bad idea. But "we" also need to think accurately about what the problem is.

The author, one Kim Brooks, reports that high school English classes were a boon to her, possibly saving her from hard drugs and "Young Life Chapters," whatever those are.

Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

"The creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write." That set off alarms for me.

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

It's true that Ms. Brooks wouldn't have learned in high school English what she needed to know about this. Let me help. College students' lack of "basic skills" are not a concern only for the current generation. I've long liked this quotation I found in Gerald Bracey's Final Exam (Bloomington IN: TECHNOS Press, 1995), page 219f:

In 1880, when few people were in school, Shakespearean scholar Richard Grant White noted the millions of dollars that were being spent on public schools and asked this:

What is the result? According to independent and competent evidence from all quarters, the mass of pupils in these public schools are unable to read intelligently, to spell correctly, to write legibly, to describe understandably the geography of their own country, or to do anything that reasonably well-educated children should do with ease. They cannot write a simple letter; they cannot do readily and with quick comprehension a simple "sum" in practical arithmetic; they cannot tell the meaning of any but the commonest of the words that they read and spell so ill.

Whether or not Mr. White was correct about the extent of incompetency among public school students, he wasn't the only person who thought so. From a Harvard Symposium 2000 report by Martha E. Casazza:

One anecdote which illustrates the confusion and tension of these earlier times comes from Cornell University during the 1830's. Its founder, Ezra Cornell, "approached the professor responsible for admissions decisions and asked why so many applicants were not passing the entrance exam. The professor replied that they didn't know enough. Cornell then asked why the university could not teach the students what they didn't know. The professor replied that the faculty was not prepared to teach the alphabet. 'Can they read?' asked Cornell. The professor's response was that if Cornell wanted the faculty to teach spelling, he should have founded a primary school."

And:

By 1871, Charles Eliot, Harvard's president at that time, lamented that the freshmen entering Harvard had "bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, (and) ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation."

One caveat about the online document that contains these useful reminders: the author seems to think that the difficulties Harvard and Cornell freshmen had with spelling and composition had something to do with the canaille that elite schools were admitting out of charity:

In the 17th century, for example, at Harvard 10% of the student body came from families of artisans, seamen, and servants, and the university reserved places for poorer students whose tuition was paid for either through work or assessments imposed on the wealthier students.

The author seems to think that it was these scholarship students who dragged down the curve; but President Eliot, for example, doesn't seem to be singling them out. Besides, as a result of this concern, "the university developed an exam to include written composition, and by 1879 50% of the applicants were failing this exam and were admitted 'on condition.'" Fifty percent of Harvard freshmen were scholarship boys, and all the poorer students were illiterate? I don't believe it. It's more likely to be the other way around: scholarship boys were "grinds", often mocked and bullied by their more entitled classmates. You only need to think of George W. Bush and the well-known phenomenon of the gentlemen's C to know that Ivy League schools admitted a lot of rich preppies who weren't interested in study and expected to coast through college on their connections. And as the rest of this report shows, preparation for college has always been problematical in the US.

Ms. Brooks doesn't teach at elite schools, though: her CV includes "state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges." But if her students' incapacity is the "shocking deficit" she thinks it is, it's nothing new. This does suggest that the teaching of English should be rethought, but not by a return to the teaching of "basic skills," which never worked very well anyway.

One of my Facebook friends linked to the Salon article, and one person about my age commented,

... I was taught the "traditional way." I spent years in grammar school--yes, it was called that and there was a reason--being taught the mechanics of English from about second to eighth grade. We diagrammed sentences, learning the differences between the parts of speech, and we were marked down for every missing or misplaced comma, every run-on sentence, every wayward quotation mark, and so on. Hey, knowing how to write English is the bedrock of knowing how to communicate with others. I mourn its demise.

First off, of course, knowing how to write English is not "the bedrock of knowing how to communicate with others." Speech is the bedrock of communication with others. Literacy at any level is a relatively recent phenomenon, and widespread literacy is not only more recent, it was resisted by elites. If people couldn't communicate before writing was invented and most people were taught how to do it, what were we doing before then?

It's trivial but maybe not completely irrelevant that "English" isn't the only means of communication, and I suspect that the commenter knows better; but "knowing how to write your own language" isn't that much harder to write, and less ethnocentric. Also, just to nitpick a bit more, spelling and punctuation aren't "grammar." But these are less important than other matters.

Second, the "'traditional' way" endorsed by the commenter doesn't work very well. I went through the trial by ordeal she describes, but it had little effect on me one way or the other because I was already a voracious reader with a good memory, so I absorbed the mechanics of writing standard English before my teachers taught me to diagram sentences. (Which I considered fun, for awhile anyway.)

What was called English grammar then, and still is by "traditionalists," wasn't really English grammar; it was a Frankenstein's monster patched together from Latin grammar and historical and linguistic ignorance. (I remember disagreeing with my fourth-grade teacher, who claimed that some ignorant people said "should of" which was obviously nonsense. This wasn't her eccentricity, of course: I've encountered this construction elsewhere since then. I claimed that what she called "should of" was actually "should've," a contraction that made perfect sense. She refused to consider the point, but at least she didn't punish me. Yes, I was always too damn smart, in various senses of the word, for my own good. But I was right and she was wrong. Fortunately, I was also smart enough to let it go, and it was another lesson that Teacher doesn't always know best.)

Third, "being marked down for missing or misplaced comma, every run-on sentence, every wayward quotation mark, and so on" is a great way not to learn to write, in English or any other language. It is a good way to discourage students from writing, if that's what you want to do. (For more on this general principle, see this.) Traditionally schooling has been used to sort students into various tracks -- "vocational," academic, and others. In Europe and other countries this is often done overtly; in the US we pretend that we don't have a class system, so we sort anyway but pretend we don't. Being taught grammar didn't do me any harm, but I know that traditional modes of teaching did a lot of harm to other kids who couldn't get around them by themselves or with help from their parents, and who ended up thinking of themselves as 'stupid' as a consequence, though they were anything but.

So, what to conclude about Ms. Brooks? She needs to learn something about the history of schooling in America and elsewhere. And then she should look at the work of Alfie Kohn, Harvey A. Daniels, and others who've been rethinking the way we teach English for a long time.

Some Good Advice

(Click on the image for easier reading.)

Which reminds me, I need to read Julie Des Jardins's The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (The Feminist Press, 2010).

I Feel Your Pain, Equivalently

There are a couple of interesting articles at Slate today. One is a column by Christopher Hitchens, enraged by Noam Chomsky's recent remarks on the assassination of Bin Laden, and -- typically for Hitchens when he talks about Chomsky since the 9/11 attacks -- full of distortions.

For example, Hitchens writes:

He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

Hitchens doesn't bother to explain why it's so absurd to say that Bush's crimes vastly exceed Bin Laden's; "moral equivalence" is an epithet he's been throwing at Chomsky for years, without bothering to defend it. But he certainly takes Chomsky's remark about Iraqi commandos landing at Bush's compound out of context. What Chomsky said was:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Hitchens is a robust defender of Bush's invasion of Iraq, so he probably would not agree that it was aggression or that Bush is a criminal, though Chomsky's summary of the human cost -- "the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region" -- is accurate, factual, even (to use one of Chomsky's own buzzwords) uncontroversial. Hitchens jumped ship in 2008 to endorse Obama, and you can't say he didn't know his man, who has turned out to be as bloodthirsty and contemptuous of all law as Bush. Still, what Chomsky was doing was one of his standard rhetorical moves, as when he says that if the Nuremberg precedents were enforced, every American president since World War II would have to be hanged. This doesn't mean that Chomsky really thinks they should be hanged (as far as I know, he opposes capital punishment); he's just pointing out the vast gap between the standards the US imposed on its defeated enemies after World War II, and the US' conduct since then. (I presume that Hitchens still considers the US invasion of Vietnam to be aggression.) Maybe Chomsky's point would have been clearer if he'd offered the image of Henry Kissinger being seized, killed, and dumped at sea by foreign commandos. Hitchens still hates Kissinger and considers him a war criminal, but I'm beginning to suspect that he's forgotten why.

Hitchens garbles Chomsky's analogy in any case. Chomsky wasn't saying that the execution of bin Laden would justify the execution of Bush by Iraqi commandos; the comparison he was drawing was between bin Laden's crimes and Bush's invasion of Iraq. I imagine there are more than a few Iraqis who'd react to a lethal raid on Bush's compound in Dallas with the same satisfaction that so many Americans feel over bin Laden's killing. And not without reason, when you consider the consequences of Bush's invasion, and Americans' celebration of it. (Remember too that many Americans believed, and probably still believe, that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks, and that the invasion was retaliation for this. That's as demented as the Truther theories about September 11 as an American black op, which Hitchens ridicules in his piece, and hints that Chomsky shares.)

For that matter, Chomsky was using a rhetorical device that was used by Martin Luther King Jr. when he said in 1967 that the US was the greatest source of violence in the world. I think it’s a safe bet that King wasn’t calling for other governments to invade the US. No, he said explicitly that he had come to realize that he couldn’t condemn the violence of others without first condemning and opposing the far greater violence being done in his name by his own government. That's Chomsky's point too. But perhaps Hitchens now considers King to have been a "capitulationist", one of the "surrender faction" on Vietnam.

Chomsky's example has all kinds of implications that he didn't bother to draw out, so let me indicate a few. For Iraqi commandos to be able to land in Texas and seize George Bush in reality, the US would have to let it happen. There would have to be Iraqi military bases nearby, probably just across the border with Mexico. And despite the US' supposedly collegial relationship with Iraq since the invasion, that could never happen without our nuking Mexico and probably Iraq as well: the US would never tolerate foreign military bases on our neighbors' soil, though we expect and demand that other countries accept US military bases on theirs. So, in order for Iraqi commandos to be able to strike in the US, there would have to be collaboration between the US and Iraq on a level that is unthinkable now, but which exists between the US and Pakistan. Perhaps the US would release a Pakistani intelligence operative who shot down American pursuers in broad daylight, but only under the kind of compulsion that forced Pakistan to free a murderous US intelligence operative. The kind of situation which would give Iraq the power to assassinate Bush could only happen in a very different America than the one we live in: it would have to be an America subjected to its former victims, with many of us killed by predator drones controlled from Baghdad, and fundamentalist resistance forces in the mountains, say, of Idaho. While I would like to see George Bush brought to justice, including by Iraqis since the US surely will never do it, I don't think it would be worth the human cost necessary to let those commandos roam free -- just as I feel about the killing of Bin Laden. As I've written before, I don’t want to see this country destroyed, not just because I live here and there are people I love who live here (though those are valid reasons), but because I don’t want to see any country destroyed. I didn’t want to see the Soviet Union destroyed in an orgy of blood-letting, nor did I want to see Vietnam bombed back into the Stone Age, nor did I want to see Iraq destroyed, nor do I want to see Iran destroyed, nor Israel nor Lebanon nor Afghanistan nor Colombia nor China nor North Korea nor Indonesia nor Cuba nor the frothing Batistas-in-exile in Miami – even though they all have the blood of countless innocents on their hands.

I get the impression that many Americans have forgotten that the US supported various extremely brutal military dictatorships in Pakistan for decades, which killed and tortured their own citizens to repress political opposition. Right after the 9/11 attacks, a self-declared liberal journalist friend told me that the US should reach out to "moderate" Muslim regimes as allies; Pakistan was one he had in mind. But that's the past; we must look to the future.

One strong sign of Hitchens's dishonesty in that piece was that he dragged out once again a grievance he's been nurturing for close to a decade now:

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.)

This refers to Chomsky's rebuttal of Hitchen's bloodlust in The Nation. Yes, Chomsky mentioned Clinton's use of missiles against a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, and said that the number of deaths resulting from the lack of the medicines that the factory would have made exceeded by far the numbers who died on September 11, 2001. Chomsky wrote elsewhere of

such minor escapades of Western state terror as Clinton's bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, leading to "several tens of thousands" of deaths according to the German Ambassador and other reputable sources, whose conclusions are consistent with the immediate assessments of knowledgeable observers. The principle of proportionality therefore entails that Sudan had every right to carry out massive terror in retaliation, a conclusion that is strengthened if we go on to adopt the view that this act of "the empire" had "appalling consequences for the economy and society" of Sudan so that the atrocity was much worse than the crimes of 9-11, which were appalling enough, but did not have such consequences.

Christopher Hitchens himself had railed against the destruction of that factory in an article in The Nation, October 5, 1998. In that article he refuted administration claims that the factory was actually used to manufacture chemical weapons for al-Qaeda, and concluded that the attack had been timed to distract attention from Bill Clinton's impeachment, not as "retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam."

Well then, what was the hurry, a hurry that was panicky enough for the President and his advisers to pick the wrong objective and then, stained with embarrassment and retraction, to refuse the open inquiry that could have settled the question in the first place? There is really only one possible answer to that question. Clinton needed to look "presidential" for a day. He may even have needed a vacation from his family vacation. At all events, he acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan, and killed wogs to save his own lousy Hyde (to say nothing of our new moral tutor, the ridiculous sermonizer Lieberman). No bipartisan contrition is likely to be offered to the starving Sudanese, unmentioned on the "prayer breakfast" circuit.

After September 11, 2001, while trumpeting his concern for the Sudanese, Hitchens climbed back down from some of these positions: "As one who spent several weeks rebutting it, and rebutting it in real time, I can state that the case for considering Al-Shifa as a military target was not an absolutely hollow one. ... However, at least a makeshift claim of military targeting could be advanced... I thus hold to my view that there is no facile 'moral equivalence' between the two crimes." It's fun to watch Hitchens tying himself into knots here. (See this later critique, by Timothy Noah, of the validity of the attack on al-Shifa.) "Chomsky had not, however, claimed a "'moral equivalence' between the two crimes" -- that's Hitchens's pet term. Comparison is not equivalence, and I think Chomsky was tweaking Hitchens. He could (and perhaps should) have drawn other comparisons that were more fitting, such as the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of Clinton's sanctions, Clinton's support for a murderous military regime in Haiti, Clinton's support for the genocidal Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, and more atrocities on which Hitchens and Chomsky agreed. As I've argued, Chomsky wasn't concerned with "moral equivalence", any more than King was.

In that same piece, Hitchens stressed the importance of "intention and motive." As he said, the intention of the September 11 hijackers was to maximize civilian deaths. As he didn't say, the perpetrators of the al-Shifa attack didn't even consider the impact of destroying a nation's only pharmaceutical factory. (Perhaps Hitchens himself didn't anticipate the impact on civilians of Bush's invasion of Iraq, or maybe he didn't care.) Not that Clinton was personally much concerned. In public he felt others' pain; in private he could be more interested in inflicting it:

"We're not inflicting pain on these fuckers," Clinton said, softly at first. "When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers." Then, with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh, he leaned into Tony, as if it was his fault. "I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks."

No, we'd best not attend overmuch to "intention and motive" in US policy, which is no more aimed at maximizing freedom and happiness around the globe than al-Qaeda's. Hitchens has accused Chomsky of naivete, but what could be more naive -- to use the most charitable word -- than Hitchens's insistence that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had anything to do with overturning tyranny? As he knows full well, the US has always been able to get along with tyrants, terrorists, and Islamic fanatics -- as long as they're our tyrants, terrorists, and Islamic fanatics.

Oh yes, the other piece I noticed at Slate was on bin Laden's wives and family, and why Pakistan hasn't let the US interrogate them. It's worth reading, but it doesn't mention the one major concern you'd think would motivate anyone to keep anybody out of US hands: because they might, indeed would be tortured. I say that half-tongue-in-cheek, because Pakistan also has a history of torture, but when I remember how many Americanist fanatics are now arguing that the American use of torture contributed to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, I'd say that no matter what reasons the Pakistanis have, they should keep those women and children out of US hands.