I Shouldn't Have to Tell You This

There has been so much nonsense vomited out on the internet recently that I thought I would vent a little about it.  Some will make you angry and some will just make you wonder how the person talking dresses themselves and finds food.  It continues to be an amazing world on the web.  

1,  Your Inconveniences are NOT like the Shoah* (Holocaust) :  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this at a rally, “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” This was in references to recent restrictions on people who have not been vaccinated against Covid 19.  It isn't the first time he dabbled in Godwin territory.  This however was an extra stupid an offensive statement because the unvaccinated could easily get out of their, so called crisis, by getting a shot.  But what is more interesting is that RFK Jr. apparently didn't read to the end of the book. 

2.  Speaking of the Shoah, a recent county in Tennessee decided to remove the graphic novel MAUS from the school curriculum citing a drawing of a nude woman (which is a mouse) and bad language (found in many other books in the curriculum).  Of course that and several other recent statements by many on the teaching of Nazi Germany (true story, one Indiana lawmaker suggested it would should be taught objectively, this trying find out if he is Swiss), have led to people asking why the Shoah should be taught and what makes it unique.  I would be able to write a book on why but here are a few points.  

a.  Germany at the time of the rise of the Nazis was a Republic and Hitler and his supporters used the system to change to a dictatorship leading to the events of World War II. 

b.  The government didn't just attack the Jewish people and others they didn't like, they used the tools of state and then built vast infrastructure for the purpose of killing an entire people, with the vision of doing it worldwide.

c.  By killing the Jews of Europe that was not land won, there was no political gain, and very little economic gain to be had.  The Nazis killed people simply because they wanted them dead. 

d.  It wasn't just the Germans or the military who helped in the effort.  Ordinary citizens supported the deportation, killing and cover up of the Shoah, and we are still uncovering stories today.  

The idea that this is unique does not diminish the horrors of other genocides or attempted genocides in the 20th or 21st centuries.  But it is a point in history we can all learn from and hope to stop in the future.  And no, you having to wear a mask to go into Kroger or the Court House is not a sign imminent concentration camps. 

3.  A law professor, who has become a favorite of the right wing noise machine, Jonathan Turley, suggested the President Biden's pledge to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court may be unconstitutional.  For someone who teaches classes on the constitution he may want to read it.  Still others in the echo chamber that is the Republican disinformation cycle also suggested it violates the Civil Rights Act.  Neither is true of course because, like many of the Executive Branch responsibilities, it is absolute and the review is the advise and consent of the Senate.  He can nominate anyone, doesn't have to be a lawyer.  He can announce who he wants to nominate long before there was an opening.  Which he did by saying during the campaign that he would nominate a Black Woman to the bench.  Some have called that unprecedented.  However they are either massively ignorant of the history or the court or are simply lying.  Ronald Reagan, while running for President, promised GOP women that he would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court if given the chance and they repeated it.  When a seat came open he did just that.  When this was pointed out they said that Reagan didn't do that.  They said he never ruled out anyone.  That of course is nonsense.  But the right wing noise machine finds facts to be an allergen.  

4.   Joe Rogan, who apparently wants to be the next Alex Jones, had Jordan Peterson, on the show.  Two white guys who decided that the only people who should be called Black are those in what they called the darkest parts of Africa.  Trevor Noah, a man who grew up in Apartheid South Africa and current host of The Daily Show, did a segment on what it means to be Black.  Including reminded the two ignorant fools that in Africa no one referred to themselves as black.  In fact in the United States there were rules about how even the smallest of African ancestry made you black.  So of course someone who wants to appear relevant in the right wing theater had to speak up. Josh Denny, a comedian of sorts, decided to say that Noah had only lived in the US as a millionaire so Denny, an Irishman, knows more about being Black than Noah.  Seriously, he said that.  But then he got fired from the Food Network for suggesting he knows that woman can tell they are pregnant within 6 weeks of conception.  So being without a uterus or dark skin doesn't stand in his way of thinking he knows better about what that is like than people who do.  He is wrong but that is not unusual. 

These are just a few of the things that are just part of the mountain of nonsense that gets dumped on social media and the right wing airways every day.  It is always a good idea to take any of it with a grain of salt.  But I shouldn't have to tell you that.  

*Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe.  Used since the 1940s it is a more direct description of the killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis.  In English this is often referred to as the Holocaust, which is Greek for sacrifice by fire and has a religious connotation.  

CRT Is Not the Problem: Ignorance Is.

In 1897 the Indiana State Legislature tried to pass a bill that would legally make the value of Pi, a mathematical constant that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, 3.2 when in fact it is an ever growing decimal approximately 3.14159 (so they couldn't even round correctly).  Thankfully a professor from Purdue University was able to help stop the nonsense.  And nonsense it was.  While the idea of solving the unsolvable problem of trying to square the circle, the was a clear thought that math can be changed for the sake of discomfort.  So it is no surprise that the wise leaders of this state are at it again, with how to teach history.

There is an epidemic of state Republicans who are trying to make laws to limit how and what teachers can teach.  A response to the ginned up fear of Critical Race Theory (CRT), state elected officials are passing laws to prevent anything they think might connect itself to this legal and social theory in the public schools.  Most can't seem to understand what CRT is but they think it is bad for children.  This has led to laws both proposed and passed that would limit among other things, certain books being part of curriculum, certain words being banned from the classroom and in Indiana allowing a few as one parent to object to something in the curriculum for it to be removed.  This led one State Senator to say even European Fascism of the mid-twentieth century should be taught objectively.  Apparently there is a good size to Nazism for some Republicans. 

Republicans across the country have been trying to use the power of the State House to define what teachers can and cannot say using CRT as the reason they must step in.  They have expanded this to include any attempts by schools to move forward any social justice discussions.  This could include LGBTQ+ rights and in some cases acknowledgment and for some religious freedom.   Much like Indiana in 1897 they are swayed by nonsense that has led some to trying to outlaw words or concepts including “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness".  Others are looking to literally burn some books they don't like.  Funny how they love the Constitution until they don't.  

They also have created a list of things they are calling patriotic education.  In some cases it smacks of jingoism training.  But what is funny is just how ignorant some of the elected officials are of their country's history while trying to disappear so many stories of people.  In Virginia a new bill lists a series of things that should be taught in school.  It included, in the text of the bill, that one thing to be taught is the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Fredric Douglas.  Except Lincoln never debated that Douglas. It was Stephen Douglas and  my guess is that the moron who proposed it never read any of the debates they had.  This new crazy move by Republicans in a growing number of states feels like an attempt to make any education on the growing pains our country continues to have illegal.  This is not American and nor is it better for us.  

Let's be clear, CRT is not taught in our schools.  It is a complex academic concept that suggests that racism is not merely a product of individual hate but deeply imbedded in our societal structures. It also sees race as a social construct and we know this to be true because several ethnic or national groups were once considered non-white but not today.    At times the racist ideology is clearly the product of intentional discrimination and other times one can promote racism without intention because our bias is unnoticed.  Recent discussion of race and anti-racism have caused a large number of conservatives to react and try to lump all of any social justice movements in CRT and also tried to link CRT to the Critical Theory of the Frankfort School.  (Can you say Marxism).  Thus the ever popular RED SCARE is back in fashion, only around race and social justice.  When confronted with the fact the CRT is not a Marxist ideology (though to be far some academics who work in the area are Marxists) the sputtering sounds like my old lawnmower without adequate gasoline.   

CRT does have an influence on education as it broadens the stories of our history and brings in narratives lost due to willful bias or unconscious neglect.  Take the role of people of African descent in the Revolutionary War.  People will easily remember Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed race (African and Native American) who was killed at the Boston Massacre by British soldiers.  By many accounts the first to die and thus the first to die for the Americans in the war.  Celebrated since he has been seen as an icon during abolish, a hero to many especially African Americans, referenced in poetry and rap songs and is well known to most middle school students.  Worthy of praise there is some discussion to be had when it comes to who else might we remember.  Four times as many people of African descent fought on the side of the British than for the colonists and among them Harry Washington.  Washington was a slave to future President George Washington and was one of many who declared loyalty to the King and when the war was over was a free man who made it back to Africa.  Attucks died for a new country that kept black people enslaved for another century almost, while Washington lived out his life no longer a slave.  My guess many people never hear of the black loyalists and the various lives they lived after the war.  It expands the discussion and looks more deeply at something a scholar once asked at a conference:  Who's History is Black History?  

Who's indeed?  And that is final argument of these conservative carnival barkers who have attacked anything that even attempts to discuss racial justice as anti-American.  They couch it in the idea that parents should have the right to control what their kids are taught.  To the point that if it makes them feel uncomfortable it needs to be banished.  But it isn't all parents they want to extend the power to, that has become clear.  For decades ethnic and racial minorities have been made to feel less than in many classrooms and there was no attempt to give them the power to choose textbooks or curriculum.  Only when the status-quo of today is challenged does the ugly head of censorship rise from the conservative caucuses around the country.   So when you see your school board trying to ban books, words and ideas, stand up.  Say something.  Truth and reality are important to us all.  Be it that Pi is not 3.2, that Abraham didn't debate Fredric and that when you add a new narrative to the story of America you don't have to edit out the others, just make sure that when we see them together we can see a bigger, clearer and brighter picture.  

 

What is the Color of Their Sky

 As I write this we are a few hours away from the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol building by the right wing Trump supporters hell bent on stopping the certification of then President-elect Biden as the new President.  I remember sitting in my office occasionally checking in on the certification process when I saw it was delayed.  Then I saw what really happened.  Crowds of violent right wingers pushed passed police barricades and broke windows and doors to enter the building.  Chanting things like "Where is Nancy?" and "Hang Mike Pence".  They were not interested is securing anything like democracy.  They were a gang of anti-democratic and anti-American hoodlums who, egged on by the outgoing President and his gang of sycophants, driven by their blood lust.  They were and are criminals.  They attacked the heart of what makes our country great.  They were the opposite of patriots.  Driven by a lie and the idea that they knew better than every elected official running the election they almost succeeded in ending the great American experiment.  But they failed, on that day, to stop it.  And while some of their allies in the Congress tried to continue the charade of upholding election security by challenging the decided, investigated and certified election, the true patriots worked late into the evening to make sure we had a new President.  But now we deal with the aftermath.

One would think that the sight of so many people looking to attack and maybe even kill members of the Congress of both parties might stir the country.  Seeing a gallows built in front of the Cathedral of Democracy would chill many to the bone.  Seeing people destroy, steal and desecrate the personal belongings of our elected official might make one rethink their allegiance.  But it didn't.  For a few hours we saw some in Congress who stood behind the former President during even his most egregious actions while in the office speak out against him.  But that didn't last long.  It was less than a few days until their tune changed.  The Republican party has since created narrative after narrative to try to take any blame away from the then President, themselves and even the people who did the attack.  It is maddening watching members Congress who have said in open hearings and in speeches that it was like a tourist visit, that they were not Trump supporters but Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestors.  There were even those who blamed the FBI.  I am sure most don't believe what they are saying, in part because the facts don't agree with the nonsense.  But they say it.  It is echoed by the right wing noise machine and trickled down to the average Joe or Jane on the street.  The same people radicalized by the then President who didn't come to Washington.  And we are off to the fascist races.

But if it was just the right wing gangs who are promoting the anniversary tomorrow not as a day of sorrow but one of joy.  It is the actual Republican party that will host events lionizing the criminal rioters who stormed into that sacred space to do violence.  It is the former President who had intended to have a press conference of a sort on January 6th to somehow give his view.  It is famous members of the very Congress that was attacked who call those arrested and waiting trial political prisoners and those serving their time martyrs for a cause.  What cause?  

I don't understand.  There was no massive fraud in the last election.  Joseph Biden won in a free and fair election.  If you can't believe that and justify the attack on our country as a good thing, as a patriotic thing, as a blow against tyranny then I have to ask if you have become detached from reality.  Last year a man, unfit for office, voted out by the people, tried to stage a coup.  Using gullible angry people who said they were ready to kill the sitting Vice-President to keep the outgoing person in power.  The threat was so high that if stories are to be believed, that same Vice-President didn't want to get into a car with the Secret Service for fear he wasn't going be brought back to fulfill his duty.  If you continue to support the idea that attack on January 6th was good for the country and led by patriots then you are either fully delusional or evil.  There is no other choice.  I pray that you will come to your senses as the year continues.  However I have little hope.  My hope is however in a committee that will work day and night to find the truth, in a DOJ that said today that they are on it and working from the low hanging fruit to the top of the tree, and on the spirit of America.  In the meantime we hope that the color of the sky in the world that those who continue to support Trump as a good American is pretty enough to distract them and those who are with us can focus on fixing the broken world we now inherit from him.