Nosy Liberals Killed Princess Sarah

The tenacity of Sarah Barracuda was no match for the flood of baseless requests for information that paralyzed the executive branch in Alaska. You see, the Wall Street Journal will explain it to your stupid sexist liberal mind:

Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself. This situation developed because Alaska’s transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy.

You see, these jealousy-fueled haters of the next GOP President of America got all crazy with those Burden the Government laws. You know, the ones that force us to know everything about everything and prevent the government from keeping Extra Plus Your Eyes Only secrets safe (which, in turn, makes us less safe). Oh freedom of information, why do you hate our freedom?

Since returning to the barren oil-money-distributing Socialist paradise, over 150 FOIA requests have been filed! ONE-HUNDRED-FIFTY! Can you imagine how many files would have to be looked at? How many photocopies would have to be made? They were trying to cripple the government by turning it inside out! Only by quitting can S-P save Alaska from the info-snoops.

Making matters worse, Chairman Hussein and his Legion of Left Wing Marxist Lawyers have issued these orders about FOIAs to handcuff the states into leaning towards the hateful sunshine.

Now that we know what it takes to cripple and destroy one of the most powerful and popular Governors in the nation, who will be next? Could the regime of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley be sent the way of Palin’s simply because of the filing of 150-plus FOIA requests? What about Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who became the head of the Republican Governors Association when Gov. Mark Sanford (another tragic victim of public snooping) stepped down?

At least if those white male titans are bumped off by pesky investigations and requests, we won’t have to deal with the insufferable Camile Paglia weighing in to defend them, as she has in the case of the Wasilla Wonder.

Open government advocates are the same as the snooping paparazzo that killed Princess Di. Goodbye, Alaska Rose. And yet, I know in my heart of hearts that we will be seeing you again…

Edu-porn on the Nashville Scene

On the way from Lexington to Montgomery this weekend we stopped for sandwiches and picked up a copy of the Nashville Scene. We think Nashville’s a cool town, and it’s always nice to read about the goings-on in places we like, even if they do make us feel vaguely sad about Montgomery’s lack of, say, a music or art scene. Or an alternative weekly newspaper, for that matter. I used to work for one of these – a scrappy little alternative to Atlanta’s monster Creative Loafing that was no Stranger but still had a lot going for it before it folded. Which is to say that I’m sympathetic to the peculiar demands of publishing a weekly paper. You have to try and stay edgy while still appealing to the mainstream enough to get pickup.

The demand for pickup is why Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report are constantly running cover stories about Jesus, his dad, and that book about them. If any of those three (or preferably all) are on the cover, pickup is gonna be really high. You’ve got to give the people what they want, especially since that means you are going to sell more ads, and ads are what pays the bills – not some off-beat music review of a quirky band about 10 people went to see the other night.

Therefore the Scene’s cover story this week – “The Revolutionary,” a straight up piece of edu-porn doing its best to ape edu-treacle like “Dangerous Minds” and “Freedom Writers.” This is what the people want – feel-good stories about the individuals Making A Difference in our troubled school systems. The Scene stands and delivers by introducing us to genius principal Greg Hutchings.

After the first paragraph or so, you already know what to expect: tales of the principal knowing the names of all the students, anecdotes about him clowning around with the students (a special F minus for whoever decided to caption the basketball game photo “Though he may air-ball occasionally, Hutchings scores points with students”), quotes from fawning parents, the usual workaholic-who-thinks-only-of-the-children type stuff. You don’t need to know anything about Hutchings in particular to write this kind of story – like writing a formula romance novel, the names could basically be filled in later.

It is clear that author Caleb Hannan has mastered the elementary skills of feature writing. He can mix metaphors (we’re told that the mayor is “waiting for the governor’s green-light to bulldoze the school board and grab the crown”) and generate head-scratching analogies (”Hutchings backs up as he’s giving his answer, with the teacher matching him step for step, creating the momentary visual of a hankie-waving suitor, running down the platform as the train pulls out of the station;” “Being an urban principal is like presiding over a Balkan state in civil war, the attacks coming from multiple fronts with each faction speaking a different tongue.”) with equal aplomb. He curses once, just to remind you that this you’re reading an edgy alternative weekly (”Then there’s the tyrannical hard-ass”). He presents “both sides,” but in the weakest possible way – just enough to (maybe) duck charges of being a PR piece for Hutchings.

These are all just frills, though, Hannan’s own elaboration on a particular kind of genre piece. Like the movies cited earlier, edu-porn tells us a particular kind of story about the education system that basically attributes the problems in education to a lack of charismatic individuals. Rather than, say, structural problems or underlying social disparities, or greater cultural factors, or economic circumstances, or, well, anything except lucking out by being able to make a connection with someone who Genuinely Cares About You in school.

Which is the problem with this kind of feel-good edu-porn. It’s telling us a story designed to make us feel good about our schools when in fact the story should make us feel just the opposite. If school success depends on people like Hutchings then our schools are doomed. Even this story all but comes out Cassandra-like on the fate of the Nashville schools by saying that when Hutchings leaves, there is no plan to replace him (well, parents say they plan to “clone him”). Presumably the school will just revert to its previous state. And what of the other schools without a Hutchings to help them out?

Hannan doesn’t go there, preferring instead to end on an “up note” with Hutchings saying “Don’t you know it’s not work if you love what you do?” Too bad he left aside the implication of this: that other people who struggle with the byzantine public education system, children whose opportunities are epically constrained, and a society that expects school to fix the problems it creates without resources or patience, finally burning out and leaving the profession simply do not love what they do.

Hooray for effective planning

So there’s going to be a Michael Jackson memorial at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday. Predictably, more than a million people tried to get tickets. About 8,500 won the lottery and get two tickets apiece. These tickets come with wristbands (to make them “scalper-proof” – good luck with that). The catch is that if you won tickets, you have to pick them up at Dodger Stadium. Now, Dodger Stadium is a fun place to see a ball game, but it is not a fun time trying to get to Dodger Stadium. There is no public transportation except a bus that goes to and from Union Station downtown before and after games. Driving to Dodger Stadium is a hellish nightmare, among the worst traffic experiences available in the land of bad traffic experiences. The only thing worse than driving to a game is trying to leave a game – something that can take many hours and explains, at least in part, why Dodger fans are notoriously bad for leaving before the game is over.

So to get your tickets, you’ll need to get to one of LA’s least accessible places. By car. And if you don’t have one? I guess you can take the train to Chinatown and walk up that MASSIVE hill to the stadium. You could also bike up the hill and lock your bike in the smoking section. If you’re in a wheelchair, well, you’re probably out of luck.

Good thing the city of Los Angeles is going to be bankrolling this memorial ceremony for millions of dollars, no thanks to the Jackson family, who haven’t offered to ante up so far. Don’t stop till you get enough, people.

Russia Loves Obama’s Oldest War

It is difficult to conjure the proper analogy to describe the recent news that Russia is allowing the United States to fly through Russian airspace in order to further prosecute the war against Afghanistan.

On one hand, there appear to be any number of geeky comic book references that one could make. But the problem is that the United States and Russia are not super heroes, even though they were once “super powers.” And the foe they are uniting to face has thwarted them both individually in the past. So instead of, say, Spider-Man (the U.S.) and Ghost Rider (Russia) teaming up against some oft-vanquished foe (say, Dr. Octopus), this really is more a case of Yosemite Sam (the U.S.) and Elmer Fudd (Russia) teaming up to try to catch that ever-wily rascal Bugs Bunny (Afghanistan).

The Wabbit Afghanistan has been the thorn in the side of the United States and Russia for nearly a half century now. The onslaught of forces unleashed upon that nation both failed to subjugate the people there and also prompted the blowback that, among other things, brought to you the events of September 11, 2001. That little invasion of Georgia? Who’s going to hold grudges about a little thing like that? Not when there are caves to strafe! That’s what makes it a team-up! D’uh! Didn’t you hear that we totally, like, overload reset our relations?

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Now, after both “super powers” spent billions failing to whip the Afghans alone, Obama has struck a deal with Putin’s puppet so that a cooperative effort can be waged to pummel the already-brutalized nation a bit more. Twelve flights a day are allowed. More airstrikes? You got it. Crossing the border into Pakistan with both manned and unmanned expeditions? No problem. Maybe the Russians themselves will put back on their hunting caps and join the rootin’ tootin’ six-shootin’ boys from America in yet another effort to smoke out them varmints.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet ... about flyover rights.

This is only a test

School’s out for summer, so it’s time to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic again. In California, the state budget committee has recommended that the state get rid of (or at least set aside till 2013) its new-ish graduation test, the CAHSEE, due to the state’s massive budget problems. That’s not going to happen – Arnold has said he’d veto that proposal, and the smart money isn’t betting on the votes to override. Meanwhile Alabama is considering eliminating its own graduation test (the AHSGE) while switching over to end of course exams and mandatory ACT testing for high school seniors.

I first got interested in high school exit exams when I heard a radio interview with California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell on the subject. Among other things, he said that the exit exam was necessary because the grades students received in high school were increasingly unreliable because of disparate grading standards and what amounted to a large scale program of social promotion. I was stunned to hear the state superintendent admit that he didn’t know what students were learning in high schools, much less what teachers were teaching and how they were grading. Now, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck – in a state as big as California, where almost a fifth of the nation’s K-12 students attend school, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there’s no perfect information funnel going to the guy at the top. But still, really? We need a test because the grades are that unreliable?

The usual people weren’t pleased (especially parents of special education students required to take the test), litigation ensued, and now the thing’s really only just started, with the class of 2006 being the first to have diplomas withheld (nine percent of the graduating class) because of failure to pass the CAHSEE. And now there’s a battle to keep the CAHSEE.

Interesting that in this area, Alabama looks to be moving ahead of California, and in the right direction to boot. There’s really not much in the way of good evidence to show that minimum competency exams like the CAHSEE (or the AHSGE, for that matter) increase student achievement (measured by test scores, the usual caveats about that applying here), and there is some evidence that these tests push students who can’t pass them out of school (though that evidence isn’t that strong).

The evidence supporting end of course exams is much stronger, much of it drawing from the successes of New York’s Regents exam system. Mississippi, not known for jumping ahead on progressive policy reforms, has started its own end of course exam system. These exams make more sense as part of a school improvement package, especially if they are aligned with a curriculum that sets higher expectations (like Alabama’s First Choice program) for students – i.e., if you have to pass a set group of classes to graduate, why not have standards-aligned uniform tests for those courses? Either way, you’re still “teaching to the test” (and I’m not sure that, in principal, there’s anything wrong with that – depends on what “the test” is and how you’re “teaching to” it) – the difference may be higher expectations as regards course taking requirements in high school.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in Alabama. For example, what will happen to special education students? One of the big reasons the CAHSEE’s English requirements are set at a 10th grade level is to accomodate the two-year delay expected for special education students. Will those students be exempted from a standard 12th grade English test? Will that increase special education redesignation to get around graduation rate expectations, as it did in Texas under Rod Paige? Or will the state get serious about making a testing system that works, especially now that it’s going to be forced to count “real” high school dropouts?

Now, More Than Ever

Another sunset has given way to a new day. The sleepers have awoken. You are now one day older, nearer to death but wiser. The world has reset and we are looking out at a vast new panorama of opportunity.

You gird yourself for the coming day: meetings, phone calls, maybe some traffic. There will be (in theory) foods to eat and tasks to take care of. You’ve got to hype yourself up. Give yourself the Pacino pep talk from Any Given Sunday. Life is just a game of inches.

You look around at the world you woke up in. Maybe it’s a world with a legacy of problems that permeate every molecule. It’s certainly a world where the time for talk is over. The whole thing is at risk here, people. Do you want to read another report, or do you want to do something? The whole future depends on this moment and the choices we make today.

Important forces are colliding as you read this. Some people stayed up all night and are still working. No sleep. Drug-fueled. Major issues at stake. The fate of millions hanging in the balance.

One person can stand on the street with a sign. The rapt attention of millions can be garnered with a little freaky and a lot of determination.

Working in groups can accomplish even more, but comes with new kinds of risks. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.

In the words of the dreamer from Waking Life, “This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.”

Top Katrina Criminals

Hurricane Katrina is one of our nation’s great tragedies. From the massive storm itself, to the catastrophic mismanagement of the immediate response, all the way through the continued long-term intentional neglect of the poor, the entire arc of the story is one wreathed in a particular swampy blend of horror and dismay.

Certainly there are plenty of nameless villians to go around, from the power drunk elites thrilled to impose martial law in New Orleans to the insurances companies exploiting artificial wind/water damage claims in order to deny coverage. But let’s take a look at some of the people who actually used the storm (and the effects from which America’s gulf coast has still not yet recovered) as an excuse to line their pockets.

First off, we’ve got the mayor of the Mississippi city of Gulfport. Mayor Brent Warr and his wife, Laura Lean, were on the recieving end of a 16-count federal indictment back in January for conspiracy, Federal Emergency Management Agency fraud, Department of Housing and Urban Development home grant fraud and insurance fraud, all arising from Katrina claims.

Warr is still listed as the Mayor of Gulfport on the city’s website and he obviously hasn’t been convicted yet. But the fact that you are being slammed by the feds for theft and misconduct instead of being heralded as a leader in your community, well that says plenty.

While we’re on the topic of Mississippi, let’s take a look at some other communities in the Magnolia State. How have these muncipalities treated the victims of the storm?

The City of Bay St. Louis passed an ordinance requiring Katrina cottage owners to exercise homestead exemptions. The City of D’Iberville passed one requiring cottage owners to have owned land in 2005 and have recieved a homestead exemption, and cottage owners are banned from ever renting them. The City of Long Beach says no cottage can remain on private property. And Mayor Warr’s fine City of Gulfport has said that any citizen within 160 feet of a Katrina cottage can veto the placement of a cottage … on someone else’s land!

Those facts may be misplaced in a post about criminals, but you can’t be a criminal if you re-write the law, right? Besides, there’s concern by several groups that those municipal acts may violate federal fair housing law.

And don’t think the housing discrimination is limited to Mississippi. A report out of New Orleans found that a full 100 percent of 22 complexes are totally inacessible to the disabled. And let’s not forget those HANO workers who were stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is not a minor quibble. Here is a sad Washington Post story about the individual impacts of this sizable and shameful problem.

Then we’ve got new head of the Republican Governor’s Association (thanks Gov. Argentina!) Haley Barbour. Diverting $570 million from hurricane recovery into port expansion? You betcha, Charlie. I’m sure that’s enough to make Tuscaloosa developers, who spent Katrina GO Zone tax credits on football gameday condos, green with envy.

How about these fine gentlemen, who knew ahead of time that the FEMA trailers were full of toxic and poisonous formaldehyde? These are the people who run the companies that made the toxic tin cans that were given to our nation’s poor at their greatest time of need. They stood up before Congress and admitted that they knew about the health risks of their shoddy products. Republicans Dan Burton and Mark Souder said that we should be commending these companies instead of hassling them about their products. As a result of the outrage over the formaldehyde scandal, the feds have lowered the standards on acceptable levels of formaldehyde, leaving owners (Katrina victims) in a bad spot where they can’t get rid of the trailers, but also can’t stay. Expect major action on the civil lawsuit front in this area.

Look, obviously not everyone has behaved poorly. There were several heroic tales of courage from the moments the storm was sighted. The outpouring of charity has been commendable. But the true measure of a nation’s greatness is how it responds when the spotlight and national pressure are off. Some have continued to try to develop creative solutions.

This is also not to give the impression that the tragic results that we have seen over the past 4 years are the results of a “few bad apples.” Clearly the damage and disasterous response were not the results of a few folks looking to get rich. There are systematic forces at play that cause the poor to be on the short end of the aid supply chain. And developers can’t be faulted for wanting to run the poor off of their valuable waterfront property so that condos for the rich can be built. It’s just what they do. It’s what the market wants. In fact, by highlighting people who broke the laws, perhaps it obscures the crimes of those who didn’t.

The King Is Dead

I don’t have a whole lot to add to the staggering onslaught of information and reflection about yesterday’s death of Michael Jackson. I, like so many people my age, had Thriller on vinyl and came of age as “The King of Pop” was making his MTV-fueled leap to global iconography. His talent was as undeniable as his subsequent weirdness, although his passing has led me to read more about Quincy Jones and respect him even more than I once did. Jackson’s artistic (and commercial) downfall began not long after parting ways with Quincy, although there were still glimmers of the true artist that would peek through the tabloid mania over the past decade. One of my favorites was the legendary episode of The Simpsons where MJ devoted his voice to a mental patient deluded into thinking he was Michael Jackson.

My first instinct was to manufacture some outrage about the media mania over Michael Jackson’s death. Fifteen people died in a Baghdad market explosion today. And the government reads all of your emails. But you won’t see much talk about that. MJ distracts us from “real news” one last time!!!

But I think that’s wrong-headed. I think it’s important that people reflect on the happiness that Michael Jackson brought into their lives because of his music. And if that means that people have to have dance parties or publish absolutely terrible essays about joy, well, then that is part and parcel of reflecting on the impact of an artist, both on our lives and on our culture. It’s important that people consider the universal appeal of Michael and his music, his universalism.

I was part of the crowd that was coming into music right as Nirvana knocked MJ off the charts, pretty much for good. His pop anthems and over-produced, hyper-expensive shows clashed with a stripped down, raw alienation that seemed more primal and infinitely more real. He was confused and pathetic and I considered that vinyl copy of Thriller to be a relic from a time before I knew much about music. I’ve nuanced that opinion some since, obviously, and would gladly defend the artistic merits of Michael Jackson against those idiotic talking heads who tried to link him to Farrah Fawcett just because they died on the same day. One was on a TV show for a year and sat still while someone took a picture of her that became a famous poster. The other worked his ass off, starting with a nightmarish childhood, and ultimately created enduring works of art that resonate around the world and across generations. It’s lazy to say that they are each defining signifiers of their respective pop cultural decades.

I don’t think Michael Jackson was particularly smart. He didn’t “invent” the Moonwalk. He stole the most memorable part of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” from Manu Dibango (and paid a fat settlement for it). And maybe Quincy was responsible for most of those hooks and maybe MJ couldn’t exist in a world where hip-hop reigned supreme. And I always liked Chris Rock’s take on MJ. But he was a gifted entertainer and he brought people together, across any huge number of dividing lines.

And so I don’t begrudge people their reflections. It’s important to think long and hard about pop culture, even if it’s ultimately not more important than Obama’s continued two wars, the health care debate, the global warming bill passed by the House today, etc., etc.

A Wednesday

Some blogs are diaries of sorts. This one never has been. But I have also been wary about being formulaic when posting to this blog. And sometimes, some of the more personal and reflective posts on Toxic Culture have been some of the more popular. But I don’t write for popularity (or do I?). Anyway, more on the climate bill and all that sort of stuff later.

For now, I was just thinking about the passage of time. I felt very neighborly today. I talked politics with my super racist air conditioning repair guy (Who actually uses the word “coon” when talking to a stranger?). I had a nice lunch with two ladies from work and we talked about their children and the complexities of modern dating. I waved to various neighborhood folks as I walked the dog an extra long path around the block. I talked to my next door neighbor about his daughter, who is off to her first day of day care tomorrow. He’s nervous. She’s crawling. He hopes she’ll learn to walk by watching the other babies.

I’ve been wondering about my goals. Something about the short term tasks of the world instill me with a kind of fear. My own pleasure at watering the garden makes me wonder if I’ll ever come to a point where I lose sight of big picture questions in lieu of thinking about minor household repairs or the doings of the pets. Certainly I’m not the first to consider such matters. I’m told that this is a theme of the book Revolutionary Road, which I have neither read nor seen the recent movie adaptation of. And certainly I’m not going to let some kind of vague existential dread about death and mediocrity prevent me from picking up the dry cleaning or making the car payment.

It seems like we live in a world where virtually everything is available to us. We can be stimulated by sex and sports and celebrity culture any time we want. It’s always “something” season, and we’re damn well invited to tune in and turn on. The most bizarre fetish in the world is a click away. And yet, something continues to churn within people. The Governor of South Carolina, one of the most powerful people in the world, feels compelled to run away and throw away a chance to be President of the United States. People continue to do selfless work at great personal cost for no other reason than to help others have better lives. And people who justifiably resent middle class malaise continue to yearn for and strive for the same levels of luxury that the effete denounce as world-destroying. It’s all (always) just a matter of perspective.

In the words of King Missile:

I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona:
Invisibility and obscurity,
detachment from the ego and all of it’s pursuits.
Unity is useless
Comformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to
stagnation and death.
If what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense,
that’s because sense can not be made
It’s something that must be sensed
And I, for one, am incensed by all this complacency
Why oppose war only when there’s a war?
Why defend the clinics only when they’re attacked?
Why are we always reactive?
Let’s activate something
Let’s fuck shit up
Whatever happened to revolution for the hell of it?
Whatever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just
protesting cause it’s Saturday and there’s nothing else to do?

This week in leadership

I’m fascinated by the considerable ink, time and money spent on trying to pin down, measure, and therefore foster “leadership.” There are entire academic journals, departments, and conferences dedicated to figuring out who our leaders are and what they do that makes them leaders. Most of “leadership studies” seems to occur after the fact – we look at a series of events, see that someone emerged as a pivotal figure in those events, and call them a leader. Then we try to figure out how they got to be a leader. Even though, presumably, they got to be a leader because we called them that.

No matter! We charge ever more deeply into the theoretical heart of darkness with the people who believe that leaders share certain “traits.” These people believe that if we study and measure these traits, we can identify leaders early. Or train ourselves to be leaders. These are the same people who put credence in joke psychology like Myers-Briggs (”It’s like it’s known me my whole life!”), not caring to know anything about that test’s extremely sketchy “methodological” underpinnings. They are also likely to be at least partially responsible for the shockingly high sales of books in the Business Claptrap genre – the lesser heirs of Dale Carnegie, all clustered around playing dice for the tattered remains of bourgeois dignity while counting their airport bookstore sales.

Not content solely to study victors’ history, scholars (and the Who Moved My Cheese types) have created also a whole subset of this stuff dedicated to studying “followership.” I know. I thought that was a joke too. But it’s not. There are a whole raft of books and articles that study followers. Presumably those are the people who are not leaders, allowing us to therefore figure out who the leaders are apophatically. But some of these books also argue that followers can themselves be “change agents”  (a despicable turn of phrase even for this noun-obsessed crowd), so wouldn’t they therefore be, um, leaders?

Well, as my boy Ralph says, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The point is that we have leaders. And these leaders, on occasion, do interesting and noteworthy things. Like beat their subordinates. Or disappear. Or decide not to run for governor based on reasons that have basically nothing at all to do with the real reason they’re never gonna be governor.

The mysteries of leadership. If these things seem incomprehensible to you, that’s why you’re still a follower, no matter where the MBTI’s random number generator places you. Might be better off getting your astrology chart done. At least that way you’ll have a work of art to hang up when you’re done.