Letters to Charlie-Our Schools, Their Madrassas

Letters to Charlie is a collection of emails to a long time friend. He worked hard and did very well. To many of his wealthy conservative friends, Charlie is an anomalous dreaded liberal. He forwards many of their hateful and distorted right-wing emails to me and I frequently send Charlie my free-flow take on them. Education was the topic for a recent series . . . Islamic Madrassas V/S American schools.

Imagine if all the glistening red white and blue was stripped from the history of America that is, or was, taught in our public schools. Americans just do not want to talk about or remember the darker history of this great country. But a mere 46 years ago black Americans were denied basic rights and could not drink from the same water fountains designated for use by white people. The same went for transportation, eating in restaurants, staying in hotels or motels, or voting without intimidation or paying a "poll tax."

1964 is not that long ago, Charlie. There was even great doubt that JFK could be elected as president because he was, gasp, a Catholic! Senator Joe McCarthy's Commie blacklist hearings and the actual existence of an "un-American activities committee" are well within your memory and mine.

The history of the American development of oil production in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is a sorry tale of arrogance and complete disrespect for customs and religion in that area. Ancient tribal areas had been carved up into countries with boundaries drawn by colonial imperialists . . .

Great Britain and the USA have a shameful history of using our Christian badge of correctness to disregard any other religions as misguided and wrong. We still do that. Imagine Islamic missionaries roaming the cities and towns in rural America seeking to convert Christians.

Our public schools were wisely and purposefully made to be secular and apart from religious control or curriculum. There is no mention of setting up schools in the Constitution. We are constitutionally bound to respect and practice freedom of religion in America. That, however, mostly translates to freedom to be Christian of some stripe or another. Jews continue to fight antisemitism and did not easily build their Synagogues and other places of gathering without lots of ugliness. Islam is having an even tougher time of it here being accepted as American citizens.

We invaded Iraq and blew up its already minimal, but functioning, infrastructure. People who suddenly lose their electricity, water and sewer service and who have family members rounded up and even killed get pretty mad and disgusted. Americans would react the same way if some massive power invaded us for no apparent reason and crippled our basic infrastructure.

Our massively superior military took over large parts of Iraq, kicked in doors of the homes of ordinary people, wildly looking for a relatively small number of Islamic extremists. Young American soldiers by and large speak and understand only American English, so just like in Vietnam, the Iraqis became the "foreigners." Our ignorance of historic Sunni - Shiia religious sectarian hatreds just added to needless stirring up of an old hornet's nest.

Cumulative ancient local hatreds easily shifted to the Americans invaders. What had been a few extremist individuals, dedicated Islamic jihadists, easily turned into an easily organized resistance against the American invaders, and attracted extremists from other countries. Martyred suicide attacks by one sect against another expanded to larger and larger suicide attacks against the American invaders.

Now, a trillion dollars later with 4,500 dead American kids, and tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, we are still applauding our gift of bringing the first real Democracy to the Middle East. Except that has not happened.

"Freely Elected" candidates in Iraq are in a 50-50 standoff, each hewing to their tribal and sectarian power bases to get all they can for their side. Screw democracy. Screw America. Sharing is not part of the vocabulary in the ancient, tribal Middle East.

How much hatred does it take to pull off something as horrible and seemingly impossible as the 9-11 attacks? This relative handful of religious zealots not only triggered a fierce response by the American military, they also made it easy for this infuriated Christian nation to throw all Muslims into one big bad category.

So, what does a 234 year old America teach in our secular schools? What do they teach in their ancient Islamic Madrassas? Should there be a threatning gulf between the two ways of educating our young?

You and I have traveled widely, lived in other countries and have a sense of global diversity and inequity, Charlie. Most Americans never go abroad in their lifetimes, and for the past 40 years American students have not been taught much world or American history in public schools. A huge percentage of Americans have no sense at all of history, geography or civics. We have been irresponsible in our materialism and now are pitifully lagging behind other developed nations in so many basic areas of education, health care, social responsibility, and even happiness.

And as if this was not enough, America, the land of the free, is now imprisoning itself with polarization, laziness, obesity, greed, denial and indifference. Our roads, dams and bridges are old and in disrepair, but there is a loud cry for no new taxes. And a loud conservative minority would do away with a strong, centralized federal government.

In past national times of crisis in America the young have taken up the banner of change and helped move this country forward. I don't see America's under-educated, over indulged and seeming directionless young people being able to or even wanting to step up and face the challenge.


graphic by Larry Ray

Pat Robertson says Haiti quake "deal with devil"

700 Club: Faustian Deal Reason for Haiti Disaster

Former United States Presidential candidate and Conservative right wing televangelist, Pat Robertson, is clearly going further off his religious rocker. It could possibly be that neuron-devouring plaque is now invading the far-right side of his brain. Whatever it is, it is more than disturbing.

Today on his cable TV Christian Broadcasting Network, the loopy Robertson, chatting with his co-sidekick told viewers,

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it, they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince, true story."

True story folks! More outrageous details on the pact with the devil bedtime story in the incredible video above. What is even more frightening than Rev. Robertson is that a substantial national audience never misses his story time, and seems to love his deluded, outrageous claims.

He has also been reverently supported by the hard-core remnants of the Republican Party leadership who seemingly have no problem with his twisted delusional language.

Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands are reported to have been killed in the violent, damaging quake. Untold thousands with untreated broken limbs and other grave injuries are without help with existing emergency resources depleted. Reports from those there say the disaster is indescribable. The dead, just 24 hours after the quake, are stacked in the streets.

Robertson's devoted, responsive audience could have been immediately urged to invoke their Christianity and donate generously, not to the 700 Club, but directly to international aid agencies to speed direct help to the devastated Haitians. Instead he told his viewers that the 7.0 magnitude earthquake was a Faustian payoff for the poor souls in Haiti whom, he clearly suggests, had it coming for Haiti's "deal with the devil."

Sweet Jesus . . . .

Empathy Meets Realpolitik

Summertime and the living is easy . . . for our elected politicians in Washington D.C..

In just a few days they will suspend their hearings and deadline-driven decision making and return to the voters back home who keep them in office.

Homeless veterans across America, American children who do not have enough to eat, families facing foreclosure and unemployment all will still all be there when this great leadership body returns in a month or so, their campaign cash needs having been firmed up after non stop meetings with their voter base.

Meanwhile, last weekend almost one thousand homeless American military veterans in the San Diego, California area sought help at a three-day tent city program called "Stand Down." This volunteer effort has been operating for more than 20 years. It is a three-day chance for homeless veterans, many from the Vietnam era, but with increasing numbers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to get free housing and social services. Hot food, a haircut, dental work, legal aid and a clean place to sleep in a familiar military camp setting is there to help these souls living on the very edge.

That in the USA we have a thousand former military veterans, down and out in the shadows of one large city should evoke both sadness, and no small amount of outrage and frustration. However, it is not just San Diego. The Department of Veterans affairs estimates that one out of three homeless people across America is a veteran.

How do all the car magnets and lawn signs urging that we "Support Our Troops" somehow exclude those troops who become disabled and fall through the cracks once they get back home? Do we just say tough luck to those who turn to drugs and alcohol, the ones who desperately need extra help? Where is our empathy?

Empathy? Conservative politicians have loudly used that word as a pejorative just recently. The word was invoked by President Obama as a desirable quality in a federal judge. More specifically his nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Empathy? An effete, bleeding heart label? Hardly. Empathy is simply the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But in that very definition we see among our elected leaders many who neither understand, nor share the feelings of others than themselves and their starchy conservative cohorts.

Empathy? How many of our nation's leaders have ever gone to bed hungry? U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that, "12.4 million children in the U.S. are 'food insecure' -- defined as not being able to get enough food to maintain a healthy, active life."

Food insecure? Simply say too many of our kids are hungry, not getting enough to eat. American kids. Using some bureaucratic euphemism does not fill empty tummies. Euphemisms do make the reports coming out of Washington agencies look a little less shocking. "Food insecure" doesn't jump off the page like "starving" or "undernourished," and helps keep this disgrace beneath the political radar.

Homeless American veterans and American children who never get enough to eat are merely two examples of ongoing problems that many of our politicians somehow must not hear about when they go back home. Our bloated and ineffective health care system is on this long list of old and worsening problems. But as a majority of our politicians now are working diligently to finally bring forth a new overhauled and affordable universal health plan for all Americans, conservatives reflexively throw up roadblocks.

Conservative protests about leaving huge indebtedness to our grandchildren actually mask a selfish fear of losing votes back home if they support a new, and initially expensive national health care plan. Empathy is absent from this narrow reasoning. Personal political career interests hold hostage the entire inertia and completion of work, particularly in the House of Representatives.

The very politicians now expressing such deep concern for our national debt were deafeningly silent as President Bush raised the national debt each of his eight years in office to a breathtaking record $11.3 trillion.

Properly done, universal health care would eventually greatly reduce soaring insurance and overall medical costs. But initially, funding for such a massive landmark change in the way we take care of America's health will be expensive and will require political backbone to make it a reality. More backbone is still needed to address the needs of homeless Veterans and our undernourished children.

Approval of long overdue universal health care will require the very two things sorely lacking in current political opponents - statesmanship and empathy. For those lacking these qualities, it is essential that we point them out, on both sides of the aisle, and inundate their offices with email, letters and phone calls demanding that they use their stated concerns for program cost as positive negotiable input to the committees working to craft the final health plan and not as a singular duplicitous barrier to progress.

.
Graphic - Larry Ray

Yowling Conservatives: Preferring to Defy Definition?

The cable channels are choked with yowling, contumacious conservatives who rail against President Obama's emergency stimulus bill and a federal bailout of failed financial institutions. What makes them "conservative?" Defining "Conservative" as it applies to today's obstreperous orators is not an easy thing to do.

The shaping and molding of today's conservatives has taken a twisting path over past decades. From the Whigs of the 1830's to the early twentieth century when Teddy Roosevelt's governing style was more as a Progressive than a Conservative, on to the promises of Herbert Hoover that prosperity was just "on the horizon," defining conservatives has been but a series of redefinitions.

Other evolutionary benchmarks include William F. Buckley, Jr's founding of The National Review in 1955. It was a magazine where writers could express their disagreements with liberal views and leadership. Buckley attracted the strident anti-communist, Robert W. Welch, Jr., who founded the John Birch Society and helped bankroll the new right wing magazine. The anti-left, anti-liberal movement picked up steam in the 1970's with Irving Kristol's attacks upon those whom he saw as "soft on communism." Kristol is credited with starting the neoconservative movement which ultimately produced the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and most of the top players in the eight years of the George W.Bush administration.

But, in a few words, what do conservatives believe today? What do they want from government? The conservative family tree is a murky genealogy. It ranges from Whigs to Libertarians to the influence of Russian immigrant and popular author, Ayn Rand, whose "Atlas Shrugged" is still a top seller on Amazon. Rand, to me, was like the oracle Sibyl, because her populist political pronouncements are interpreted so broadly from opposing poles.

It has been noted that, "On the left, linguist and analytic philosopher Noam Chomsky considered Rand "one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history." On the right, conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. declared: "Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn."

More recently, Social scientists at UCBerkeley undertook a detailed non-judgmental study of "consistent underlying motivations of politically conservative agendas." It basically boils down some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism which include:

• Fear and aggression
  
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  
• Uncertainty avoidance
  
• Need for cognitive closure
  
• Terror management

Prof. Jack Glazer of the University of California explains, "Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions. They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm."

That certainly seems to apply to the flat statements of present day conservatives like Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and certainly John McCain. "Our plan would create 6 million jobs," is a common claim they present. However no one has ever bothered to explain their "plan" and how it would create jobs. Conservatives seem to believe, just as they believe they are going to heaven, that if we only granted tax cuts, tax credits and tax-rebates without actually spending any money, we would create 6 million jobs and overcome a recession. They also call for "Victory in Iraq" which is equally undefined, and undefinable.

So, what is left of the so-called conservative-base today are at each others throats. Radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh, exploits their discord, whipping up a frenzy. It seems so difficult for conservatives to admit they may be wrong. It is equally hard to admit that Limbaugh is playing them all like a cheap guitar while he rakes in millions from his outrageous radio show.

Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard University, asks, "Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong."

British Economist, John Maynard Keynes' economic policies basically state: "The modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." Such governmental control is anathema to conservatives. Today, they refuse to admit that their gradual removal of the Keynesian oversight of banks and Wall Street largely brought about the mess we are in today.

Keynes himself noted, appropriately, "I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past."

Stuck in a time warp of denial and obstinacy, it seems that conservatives today continue to thrash about as harsh reality bangs hard against their deep seated belief in some sort of fiscal tooth fairy.

Rush Limbaugh this afternoon reached new heights of megalomania when he invited President Obama to come to his studio and debate him. Regarding the invitation, Mr. Obama will certainly apply his understanding that, "If one finds oneself in an argument with a fool, make sure he is not similarly occupied."




graphic by Larry Ray