The Children's Crusade

... the phrase being formed in the same way as the Albigensian Crusade, that is, a crusade against children.

The other day Homo Superior Curates the Web had a link to an article at the Huffington Post by Arianna Huffington herself, calling for "single payer for education." Vouchers, in other words. She never uses the word "voucher" in the article, which has the amazingly stupid title "So We Can't Have Single Payer for Health Care, But How About Single Payer for Education?" (The answer to that question would presumably be, "You can't have that either.") I wonder if she avoids the word because vouchers are so unpopular, or if she just doesn't realize what she's advocating?

But then, the whole article is amazingly stupid. At one point Huffington says, "Time after time, when the choice has come down to books versus bars, our political leaders have chosen to build bigger prisons rather than figuring out how to have fewer kids in them." Hm. Why not just have single-payer prisons, then? It would save money, and give communities choice in where to send their kids, and teach dropouts to make license plates; why not see prisons as an adjunct to our educational system?

Huffington's commenters recognize what she's talking about, though, and several are big defenders of vouchers. Others are not, like HuffPost blogger Anne Hill, who writes,

Yes, a single-payer education program would be what is now known as a voucher program. And that overwhelmingly contributes to the resegregation of schools, and the impoverishment of our public education system. To say nothing of the dubious, often religiously biased education that the children of those who opt for vouchers receive.

The trouble with vouchers is that they do not bring all the benefits that their advocates promise. You don't need to leave the Huffington Post to learn this; the psychologist Gerald Bracey, who's been refuting nonsense about American education for decades, also is a contributor there, and he has a few posts about the failure of vouchers. Like this one, "Vouchers Strike Out Again":

New York, Dayton, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Milwaukee, Florida, and now Washington again. Kids who use publicly or privately funded vouchers to attend private schools don't do any better in school than matched groups of public school children. You wonder how many at bats these guys are going to get. I guess when the club owners are people like George W. Bush, John Boehner, and James Leininger the answer is "infinite."

Or this one, "Sol Stern to Vouchers: Drop Dead":

Over the years, Manhattan Institute conservative contrarian, Sol Stern, has written many essays, usually in the New York Post supporting the use of taxpayer money to provide students in "failing" public schools with vouchers so they can attend private schools. Now, he says in City Journal the Institute's magazine, vouchers haven't worked and it's time for Plan B, notably a focus on curriculum and instruction (what an idea!).

Some of Stern's arguments are purely practical--most voucher-using kids go to Catholic schools (the only ones with sufficiently low tuition) and Catholic schools are closing at a record pace so where will the kids go?

His major argument, though, is more substantive. Vouchers are supposed to accomplish two things: Improve the achievement of those who use them and improve the achievement of public schools because of the competition from the voucher schools. Stern argues they have accomplished neither.

Bracey isn't the only critic of "school choice" as a policy; there's a large literature on the subject, some of which I've looked at, and Bracey's arguments aren't idiosyncratic; they're standard.

I guess we can now add Arianna Huffington to the list of people who can keep going to bat for a bad idea. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn't take a closer, more jaundiced look at single-payer health care plans. Maybe it's just a poor substitute for a government health service, like our government education service, which despite its many serious faults does a remarkably good job, in the face of all those who want to destroy it.

Elementary Arithmetic

Here's another example of the Teabaggers' tendency to inflate their numbers and significance. (I use Teabaggers generically here, for the hard-core Republican shock troops who've been getting so much media encouragement, whether by complaining that other, richer people's taxes have been raised incrementally or by ranting about Socialism and Nazism at town hall meetings.) Avedon at The Sideshow links to a blogger who's enjoyed the benefits of our great American health care system, and to her posting of the faux-sympathetic e-mail she got from a libertarian blogger known as "Con Pat."

The libertarian tells her that she should just do a fundraiser to get the money for her medical bills. He cites the case of a local child whose parents, having "lost the malpractice lawsuit and have no insurance", hold annual fundraisers to pay for their child's annual surgery and other costs. "They generate over $100k a year in donations." The story sounds suspiciously apocryphal, as several of the blogger's commenters note, but what caught my eye was the climax of Con Pat's advice:

Her bills get paid for WITHOUT using the government to threaten force against 300 million strangers.

Evidently Con Pat thinks that all taxation is government violence; well, a lot of libertarians do. I can't help wondering why they continue to live in a country that keeps its figurative boot on their necks all the time, and its figurative hand in their pockets stealing their money. Probably, to be cynical but not unrealistic, because they enjoy the many benefits of living in what they consider a Socialist/Communist society. And I doubt that if health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and tax breaks for charity hospitals were abolished, most people would be able to pay for their medical care by begging strangers for money. (One reason why those government programs so hated by the Right were instituted in the first place was that private charity didn't cover all the people who needed help.)

But notice Con Pat's number there, "300 million strangers." Forget for the moment that a goodly number of that 300 million are children. The important thing is that most Americans want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other such programs, and they want the government to extend those benefits to more people, even going as far as a single-payer health insurance program for everyone who needs health insurance, or a government-run health service that would serve everybody. Not only that: they are willing to pay the taxes that would support such programs. They don't see those taxes as a gun held to their heads by Uncle Sam, but as an obligation they're ready to take on to make a society that is livable for everyone.

Now, it's also true that many other Americans disagree. Con Pat is one. They don't want government health insurance or a national health service, and it's not good enough in their eyes that they wouldn't need to use such services if they existed: they don't want to pay the taxes that would support them for others to use. They're a minority, but they're a considerable minority. The status of minority views and wishes is not a trivial one in a supposedly democratic society, though these people rarely worry about such things when they are not in a minority themselves.

The thing is, though, that Con Pat and his cohorts are ignoring the fact that they are a minority, and they're hoping everyone else will ignore it too. They are not 300 million strong; they aren't even all working Americans of voting age. Most Americans don't view the idea of a government-run health insurance program as the threat of force to themselves. Nor is this a recent blip in the Zeitgeist, the result of mass hypnosis by our Socialist Svengali of a President. (Who, again, was elected by a majority of the voters, along with the Democratic majority in the Congress and many other Democratic politicians around the country.) It's something that most Americans have wanted for a long time, despite a determined propaganda campaign against Socialized Medicine by many forces in this country. Those who oppose it most vociferously now, the Con Pats and the Ms. TeaParty who grilled Al Franken, are a dishonest minority who do not speak for the 300 million. They should be challenged every time they pretend that they do.

(Image credit.)

What Do You Mean "We", Paleface?

I have never liked Al Franken, not when he was on Saturday Night Live and not when he proclaimed Bill Clinton a great President. But I confess that he impressed me in this clip. He's better at dealing with crowds of constituents than Barack Obama, whom it embarrasses me even to imagine in a situation like this. I can't fault Franken for not dressing down the teabagger woman in the center, but I wish someone had asked her who she voted for.

"Are you gonna vote the way the people want?" she asks Franken. "The people who elected you? Are you gonna vote their voice, or are you gonna vote how Obama wants you to vote?" Which "people" does she have in mind, I wonder? Obama took Minnesota with 54.2% of the vote, to McCain's 44.0% (and Nader's 1.0% -- the SOB cost McCain the election!). It could at least be argued that how Obama wants Franken to vote might be "the way the people want," might be "their voice." Polls have shown consistently that Americans want a publicly funded health system, and support remains surprisingly strong despite the Right's lying propaganda campaign. If Franken votes "the way the people want" on health care, he probably won't give her any satisfaction.

On what ground does Ms. TeaParty claim that she speaks for "the people"? I don't think this is a trivial point. The Teabaggers are entitled to their opinions, but their side lost the election; they do not represent the American people at large and shouldn't be allowed to pretend that they do. "The people" rejected their candidate and their party quite decisively, not just for the White House but in Congress and at many other levels. I really think they should be challenged to justify their grandiose posturing.

Why Doth the Heathen Phart?

By the way, I think I've finally figured out why liberal Democrats go batshit crazy at those of us who criticize their President from the left (and don't let's mention Ralph Nader, whose mere name still provokes spittle and accusations that he cost Gore the 2000 election, from people who really know better but just can't help themselves). There's usually a lot of projection involved, of course: the assumption that we either didn't vote at all last November or voted for Nader or some Third Party, that we have never done grunt work in an election campaign, that we're just throwing tantrums because Obama "disappointed" us, we expect him to be perfect, and so on.

For those who haven't been following -- but then, why should you? this blog isn't As the World Turns -- I voted for Obama. Not because I had any illusions about him: in fact I kept butting heads with Obama fans who had illusions by the bushel load, which they'd relinquish only when they were torn from their cold, dead fingers. And now I'm encountering again the phenomenon I encountered in 2000 and 2004: Democrats who think that they can win my vote by telling me how stupid and vicious and elitist I am, how I just want the Republicans to win, etc. Somehow I don't think that's an effective way to win votes for your side, but what do I know? (P.S. As someone else remarked, "After all, a party that's won three of the last ten presidential elections must be doing something right.")

Anyway. I (and quite a number of other people, but evidently not enough of us) am criticizing Obama, not because I'm bothered by a few little niggling mistakes in the vast tide of goodness he has unleashed since January 20, 2009, but because it's the other way around: the few good things he has done don't amount to much against his overwhelming support for America's corporate elites, his blood-soaked and hypocritical foreign policy, his continuation of the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties. I'm objecting because most of what he's done is bad, and indeed amounts to a third Bush term -- just what his partisans warned would transpire if McCain and Palin were elected instead. Even if you disagree with my suggestion that Obama has a mandate from the voters to be a flaming liberal if not an outright socialist, the fact remains that he is at odds with what most of his most ardent fans imagined he'd be like.

Therefore I have to conclude that for Obama's Democratic defenders, most of what he's doing is good -- the bailout, his garbled health "reform" plan, his support for Israel's criminal aggression, his maintenance of the US occupation of Iraq and his escalation of the US invasion of Afghanistan, and his pandering to the Republicans, and so on and on. They might be uneasy about a detail here or there, but they're willing to overlook them in the service of continued violence, terror, and mainlining vast amounts of money to the financial and corporate sectors of the US.

But even there, I'm probably being too kind to them. In a deployment of doublethink that rivals and will probably exceed the Republican streak of the past three decades, they know that something is wrong, but refuse to connect the dots: each time Obama does something that should make them angry, they pretend it's just an isolated blip, an anomaly, nothing to get too upset about. What does make them angry is anyone who points out the pattern. (This is nothing new, of course. Noam Chomsky has often pointed out how apologists for American foreign policy first claim that any upsetting criminal conduct is just an aberration, a few bad apples at work; if you point out the long historical string of such "aberrations," they accuse you of dwelling on the past, dredging up bad stuff about America instead of looking at the good -- and of course, America's virtues outweigh 'her' defects.)

The weirdest thing is that some of the same Democrats who've attacked me in these terms have also asked me why I didn't get involved in the Party and change it from within. I've tried to get involved in local Democratic Party work a time or two, but didn't get much of a welcome even before I became notorious as a Democrat-hater: they just couldn't seem to find any way that someone who didn't have a regular 9-to-5 work schedule could help out. Nowadays I already know how my criticisms of the Party would be received, and I realize that it would be reasonable on their terms to trash anyone who wanders too far from the party line. There's this thing called party discipline, the same discipline that enabled people working for Hillary Clinton who'd been attacking Obama in the harshest terms to execute an about-face and work for the Party's candidate when he won the nomination. It also requires (allows?) them to attack Republicans for doing exactly the same thing in the service of their Party and its candidates. I have my disagreements with Nietzsche, but he was right on the money when he wrote: "Now, this will not to see what one sees, this will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of any sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar."

There's no need, then to answer my earlier question, whether abusing the Party's left critics is the most effective way to win our votes. It doesn't matter. A commenter on one of the blogs I was surfing this weekend pointed out that on one hand, we don't matter, because we can't muster enough votes to make it worth the Party's while to pander to us; on the other hand, we're useful scapegoats with enormous power, who are responsible for all the Party's losses -- we cost Al Gore the 2000 election (the fact that Bush stole that election can be brushed aside as of no importance), so it would be wrong to listen to us or allow us to affect Party policy. The Democratic Party faithful like us just where we are.

As Obama Sinks Slowly on the Right

Sorry, I know I'm mixing my metaphors there.

Anyway, credit where credit's due: the Obama administration has moved to cut off non-humanitarian aid to the coup regime in Honduras. This right-wing site claims simply that "aid" will be cut off, leaving out the "non-humanitarian" part. What surprises me is that the writer, Hans Bader, mentions that Honduras is "one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere." Maybe this is meant to imply that Obama is being hypocritical in hurting the poor, since the American right has never cared about the well-being of the poor anywhere. Bader also reports that "Earlier, the Obama Administration blocked travel to the United States by the people of Honduras." That is not likely to hurt the Honduran poor, which indicates where Bader's sympathy really lies. As Vicki Gass of the Washington Office on Latin America told NPR, "if they start cancelling the visas, the student visas of children of the elite who come to colleges in the United States and their wives who go shopping on the weekends in Miami, then that might have a real impact."

However:

KELEMEN: But Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations is not so sure the U.S. can really push the de facto rulers to bend.

Ms. JULIA SWEIG (Council on Foreign Relations): What the last couple of months have demonstrated is something broader in American foreign policy, which is that the tools in the toolbox are a lot duller than they used to be, and actors - whether they're Micheletti and his supporters in Honduras or forces in Afghanistan that we want to be working with - can't necessarily be easily controlled or coerced even when they very, very much depend upon the United States.

That, I think, will have to be seen. It will also have to be seen whether Obama is really prepared to push Micheletti very hard; the usual pattern in these matters is to announce aid cut-offs, and then rechannel the money through other sources. From the Democracy Now! report:

JUAN GONZALEZ: What do you make of the decision of the International Monetary Fund recently to give Honduras about $160 million in aid?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. Well, one hand takes away; the other one gives. The United States controls, largely controls, the IMF and the fact that the IMF—pretty much concurrently with the State Department’s much heralded decision to cut off $30 million, the IMF announced that it was granting $150 million. I mean, even the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Fund, all of these institutions have declared that they’re cutting off loans and aid to Honduras, but the IMF went forward. This also is largely symbolic.

So Hans Bader shouldn't lose sleep over the Honduran people. We wouldn't want the Honduran military to run out of ammo, especially considering the threat they face from (as Sweig put it) "Zelaya, a leftist leader close to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez".

Then there's the Obama administration's decision (via) to make public the log of most visitors to the White House. As Glenn Greenwald says, Obama does deserve some credit for the decision, but it should not be forgotten that it was made not freely, in fulfillment of Obama's campaign pledges to improve government transparency, but under pressure of lawsuits by watchdog groups -- much like the torture memos that were released under similar pressure in April. From the ABC News story Greenwald linked:

The new policy is the result of the Justice Department settling lawsuits brought by the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which had sought visitors logs from both the Obama and Bush White Houses. In a letter from Justice Department attorney Brad Rosenberg, the administration outlined details of its settlement with CREW, which included the new policy.

So far only Bush-era logs have been released, which was the easy part -- well, kind of easy, since Obama has made it clear that he wants to protect Bush and Cheney no less than himself. Now let's see the visits to Obama from representatives of the health insurance industry. There's nothing wrong in itself with his listening to such people; what is wrong is that he has shut out alternatives. As Bruce A. Dixon wrote in a blistering piece at Black Agenda Report,

The only obstacle to passage of the president's health care --- or health insurance --- legislation is the White House itself. Barack Obama knows better than any of us the difference between what he promised and what is about to be delivered. The undeniable difference is dawning on much of the public too, and is reflected in sagging poll numbers for Democrats and the president. The dozens of Democrats who have declared they will vote against any health care --- or health insurance --- bill that does not contain what they call a “public option,” are only trying to insulate themselves and protect President Obama from the worst consequences of his own treachery in selling out the vision of universal health care to big pharma and the insurance companies. They aren't blocking the president's bill. They're trying to ensure that there is something in the bill they can defend to the outraged public who elected them to pass health care reform.

From the beginning the president hamstrung his own grassroots supporters. He made much of his vaunted email and phone list of 13 million volunteers useless by coming down hard against Medicare For All and any forms of single payer, which were among the prime motivations for their energy and devotion. So the people whose boundless enthusiasm swept Obama into the White House were not available to pack many of the town meetings or pressure the reluctant. Some Democrats, like Dick Durbin of Illinois canceled their public meetings for fear of left leaning hostile, and likely pro-single payer crowds which even corporate media would find it hard to ignore.

Speaking of which, Avedon at The Sideshow links to this article which offers evidence that the corporate media are giving visibility, and therefore credibility, to the right-wing shock troops disrupting the town hall meetings: if the teabaggers aren't stirring up shit, then it isn't news and needn't be reported. So Avedon suggests,

But that's on the assumption that the "unsympathetic" will always be right-wingers who are blowing the insurance companies' horn for the Republican Party. What if liberals came and made a ruckus because "a public plan" that doesn't cover everyone isn't good enough? What if people came and interrupted "reasoned" arguments in favor of "the public option" that pointed out that a flat single-payer program that covered all Americans fully and equally would actually be cheaper than an "option" open only to a small segment of the population and full of administrative money-wasting? What if angry liberals demanded to know why single-payer is off the table?

Well, of course, that wouldn't be news either. A tiny turnout of pro-Republican protesters is always news, while protesters from the left will be ignored, minimized, and caricatured.

Finally, there's the hullaballoo over President Obama's planned speech to the nation's schoolchildren, apparently on the theme of community service and hard work. The Right, suddenly, is concerned that the speech might have a political agenda; Roy Edroso's liberal commenters are all, like, JFK and "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!" (Some, rather creepily, drew a connection between Kennedy's call for service and his assassination, with dire implications for Obama. That's like the Jesus fans who say that Jesus was crucified for preaching love ... but I digress.) Speaking from the perspective of someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when overt political propaganda was part of the air we breathed in school, I have mixed feelings about this. Sure, the speech will be innocuous: who could object to the President's urging kids to work hard, stay in school, and care about their communities? Not even me. And it's entertaining to watch the Right frothing about the Obama cult of personality, so soon after their fawning adulation of George W. Bush, and their ongoing cult of Ronald Reagan. Glenn Greenwald quotes Jay Nordlinger, a blogger at The National Review, who complained:

When I read about that celebrity video where they say, “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama,” I thought that the people do not deserve to be American citizens, because they have no idea what America or a liberal republic is. . . . Also, it strikes me that "I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama" is the product of a thoroughly secular mind, which is another marker of contemporary America. . . . Did conservatives ever say “I pledge to be of service to Ronald Reagan”? I never heard it -- and the notion is preposterous.

Nordlinger obviously wasn't paying attention. (And how often I've heard liberals say analogous things.) Greenwald provides a lengthy selection of the cult of service to George W. Bush, which ought to be read not only by conservatives (who won't read it, and wouldn't remember it if they did) but by liberals, especially Obama fans who might (but won't) recognize their own reflections in that mirror. Do I need to link to examples of the ecstatic gushing of liberals and even leftists after Obama won the election, or the exaltation at his inauguration? (If so, this will do for a start.)

As for Kennedy's "Ask what you can do for your country," I was 10 years old when he was inaugurated, and probably thought his words were inspiring then. But eventually I learned that for JFK, what I could do for my country included not only the Peace Corps (a good but sometimes problematic program) but the CIA, killing and torturing people in Vietnam, committing terrorism in Cuba, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and running a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean. Americans who took Kennedy's exhortation seriously in less exalted areas, like the Civil Rights Movement, found that their efforts weren't it at all, not what he meant at all. Given Obama's own conduct so far, I think he may be more like Kennedy than his fans care to recognize.

Poetry Friday - My former lovers

My former lovers all are gaining weight
or going bald, it seems. Time lurches on,
they fall in step; but I procrastinate,
as usual. Just call me Dorian.
It can't be from clean living or pure thoughts.
I've seen the sun come up uncounted times
with sundry friends and strangers, sans culottes
when possible, after unnatural crimes.
Sometimes I scan my mirrored face for signs
of wear and tear, at least -- it hasn't been
all party, heaven knows. The only lines
so far are when I smile. What does that mean?
Not that I'm in a hurry, for it seems
I've drifted through my life wrapped up in dreams.

----
From sometime in the early Eighties. Since then, of course, I've fallen into step with Time myself.

One Plus One Is ... Um ... Don't Tell Me, Let Me Figure It Out For Myself

So I found this new book at the library, Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry, edited by Frank M. Chipasula, published this year by Southern Illinois University Press. It began with a selection of ancient Egyptian poetry and extended to the present; looked worth a read, so I checked it out. I started reading it this morning, and am about a hundred pages along now.

But the introduction disoriented me. On the first page Professor Chipasula says that "the anonymously written Egyptian love poems of the New Kingdom ... predate the biblical love poetry of King Solomon by over two thousand years"; on the second page he assigns his Egyptian poems to "the Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties of the New Kingdom (roughly from 1300 to 1100 B.C.)". Now, it's not certain whether Solomon even existed, and no one really has any idea whether he wrote the Biblical Song of Songs, or when the Song of Songs was written. But according to Professor Chipasula's dates, Solomon would have to have lived between 700 and 900 A.D., centuries after the beginning of Christianity and nearly two thousand years after he's traditionally supposed to have reigned. We've all heard of the division between the Two Cultures, humanities/literature on one side and mathematics/science on the other, and never the twain shall meet, but really, Professor Chipasula goes a bit far in the direction of mathematical illiteracy.

Again, on page 4 he writes, "For more than five thousand years now, the Amazigh people of the Grand Atlas Mountains ... have expressed various versions of tayri (love) for one another in Tamazight, a very old African language." Unless Tamazight has been written for five thousand years (and it doesn't appear that it has), I doubt very much that Professor Chipasula or anyone else knows what the Amazigh people were saying to each other five thousand years ago. If they were composing love poems that long ago, their work would predate by over a millennium the Egyptian poems that Professor Chipasula claims are the world's first love poems.

So what is going on here? Once again I'm wondering how these weird errors in an academic text got past the editors, referees, and other gatekeepers that supposedly guarantee the expertise of our cultural exemplars and guardians. With scholarly standards like these, who needs Wikipedia?

Not that it affects the poems in the anthology, which are worth your time to look at. Just skip the introduction if you decide to read Bending the Bow.