If y'all thought the Cobb County School Board had been put out of the business of making a fool of itself by the recent Federal court ruling against its placement of Xtian religious advertising on biology textbooks, y'all're wrong. They're still in that business and they aim to make it grow.

As if taking a federal judge's ruling against them as fighting words, the Cobb County school board voted Monday to appeal a court order to remove evolution disclaimers from textbooks.

In a 5-2 vote, board members said U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper's decision "amounts to unnecessary judicial intrusion into local control of schools," according to a statement they released immediately after the vote.

The decision came after members met with lawyers for three hours in closed session.

"We have to make our best judgment based on the facts," said Curt Johnston, a member who was chairman when the board adopted the disclaimers in 2002. He said the board believes the facts show the judge erred when ruling that the disclaimers — which call evolution "a theory, not a fact" — convey an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

In their statement, the board said it felt "condemned . . . for taking a reasonable approach to address the concerns of [Cobb] citizens on a controversial issue."

Yeah, those day-amn activist judges cain't tell us-all how we oughten to run ar schyools.

Future AJC article on a pending Cobb County School Board decision:

COBB COUNTY, GA--Rev Clarence Wildman and an angry group of four Cobb County parents stormed the Cobb County School Board last night, demanding that stickers be placed in physics textbooks warning that 'Relativity is just a theory'.

Citing a new study from the Institute to Promote Biblical Science, Wildman characterized the Theory of Relativity as "secular hogwash" and referred to Albert Einstein as "an atheistic foreigner", probably French, who had come out of who-knows-which worthless Communist Party indoctrination center calling itself a "university" armed with a scheme to destroy Xtianity by claiming that science was all relative and the universe was finite.

Wildman pointed to the story of how Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky. "Einstein's theory would have you believe that that couldn't have happened without the Earth crashing into the Sun. Since the earth did NOT crash into the Sun, that's evidence enough for me that Einstein was full of it." The IPBS study, he said, contains all kinds of new scientific information that would tend to disprove Einstein's "baseless speculations", though he declined to mention what that information might be.

"All we're asking," he concluded in a fiery oration that visibly moved three of the four parents he brought with him and scared the bejeezus out of everybody else, especially when he began foaming at the mouth, "is that you make students aware that there is a controversy. Relativity is just a theory, not a fact, and they have a right to know that there is a competing theory which explains the universe in a much more believable way--from God's own mouth." Then he warned the Board that if they didn't put the stickers in the books, they'd go straight to Eternal Damnation. "God Is Watching You!" he bellowed, standing on a rickety stack of Bibles as proof that he had "God's approval".

A noisy crowd of one thousand parents who had gathered outside the meeting to protest the placing of the stickers in school textbooks was not allowed into the meeting "for security reasons", the School Board said.

The Emperor Georgius has Big Plans for his next two speeches, the upcoming Inaugural and this year's SOTU. He's thinking about his legacy.

He wants to be remembered as a public servant who promoted political freedom abroad and economic freedom at home....

Oh. Well, as the man who stole two national elections in a row and is the new owner/operator of Iraq, our 51st State, I don't suppose he could claim to be supporting political freedom at home and economic freedom abroad with a straight face. Still, even at that it's a stretch.

On Iraq, Bush indicated that he would stay the course despite the continuing violence. "I hope that 50 years from now people will look back and say, 'Thank goodness old George W. stuck to his beliefs that freedom is an agent for change, to make the world more peaceful.' "

They might be saying that, a few of them, as they toddle around the nursing home, also under the impression that Britney Spears was a great artiste, Joe Stalin was a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, the moon is made of Swiss cheese, and they themselves are the products of an illicit union between Marilyn Monroe and Pervez Mushareff, who they will insist is the man that invented Milk Duds. Other than that....

But not to worry. The Emperor--who sees himself as a Great Man when he isn't staring into a mirror trying to work out which facial expressions best suit God's Chosen Messenger--is a man who believes whatever he says, even when it pops unbidden off the top of his cavernous head.

Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for President Reagan and now writes a column for the Wall Street Journal online, [said,] "A first inaugural asserts intention; a second inaugural speaks of what has happened the past four years and what is intended for the next four."

[Chief Speechwriter Mike] Gerson said that described Bush's intentions exactly.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, these people. The cliches pearls of wisdom and superficial slogans deep insights roll off their tongues like burnt egg off an iron skillet, don't they? One looks at the past, one looks at the future. Who woulda thunk it? Such perceptions would have escaped me completely. But now that I know how it's done, I bet I can summarize both speeches in 25 words or less.

1. Everything has been Great.


2. Everything is going to be Great.

There. Can we go home now?

I wondered, during the recent Ukrainian uprising, why Yushchenko didn't use troops to put the demonstrators down like a good little ex-Soviet normally would have been expected to do. Or as George Bush, their spiritual sister, undoubtedly would do should the zombie-ish US public ever wake up to what he's actually perpetrating on them. A fascinating piece in the NYT--just the kind of in-depth, detailed reporting they don't dare to do any more about the inside game around the Emperor--reveals that the troops were ready to go, shields, gas masks, and all. Some even had guns and they weren't loaded with rubber bullets. The Ukraine Interior Ministry had ordered a crackdown with the first disturbances, and the Army had responded.

Then, in a move that has to make Americans nostalgic for a by-gone era, the sloviviki--senior intelligence officers in the SBU, the Ukrainian version of the CIA (that's 'spooks' to you and me)--began a concerted campaign inside Yushchenko's govt to convince the Interior Ministry that such a crackdown was illegal. Mr Tenet must have--at least, should have--blushed furously when he read it.

Kiev was tilting toward a terrible clash, a Soviet-style crackdown that could have brought civil war. And then, inside Ukraine's clandestine security apparatus, strange events began to unfold.

While wet snow fell on the rally in Independence Square, an undercover colonel from the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., moved among the protesters' tents. He represented the successor agency to the K.G.B., but his mission, he said, was not against the protesters. It was to thwart the mobilizing troops. He warned opposition leaders that a crackdown was afoot.

Simultaneously, senior intelligence officials were madly working their secure telephones, in one instance cooperating with an army general to persuade the Interior Ministry to turn back.

The officials issued warnings, saying that using force against peaceful rallies was illegal and could lead to prosecution and that if ministry troops came to Kiev, the army and security services would defend civilians, said an opposition leader who witnessed some of the exchanges and Oleksander Galaka, head of the military's intelligence service, the G.U.R., who made some of the calls.

Far behind the scenes, Col. Gen. Ihor P. Smeshko, the S.B.U. chief, was coordinating several of the contacts, according to Maj. Gen. Vitaly Romanchenko, leader of the military counterintelligence department, who said that on the spy chief's orders he warned General Popkov to stop. The Interior Ministry called off its alarm.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Tenet had backed his intelligence analysts' report that Iraq had no WMD and co-ordinated efforts behind the scenes with Powell's State Intel--who had reached the same conclusion--to convince the non-hard-core-neocons in the govt that Chalabi was full of it and the WMD's were a myth? If, instead of surrendering to the Bush/Cheney faith-based intuition of Feith & Co and after lamely trying to counter all that bogus C-TEG 'intel' from Ahmad finally told the Emperor what he demanded to hear ('It's a slam-dunk, Mr President.'), he and Powell had pointed out forcefully that the threat was illusory and the Emperor's war almost certainly illegal? In other words, if he had done his goddam job?

Kind of makes you wish you lived in the Ukraine, don't it?

It's a long report but worth reading for the 'How It Should Have Been' picture of the way a reality-based govt operates, just in case it's been so long you've forgotten.

The first thing the left has to do to regain its reputation for fairness is to stop picking on the weaker members of the right.

• Echidne and Amanda tee off on yesterday's David Brooks column as if it represented the somber musings of a respected pundit rather than the immature rambling of one of the schmoozoisee's most notorious and least tightly-wound bottom-feeders.


• Kevin Drum and The Carpetbagger are up in arms over Orrin Hatch's article in the National Review claiming that the filibuster has suddenly become a 'constitutional crisis that undermines democracy', furious about the distortions and what Kevin calls Hatch's 'self-servingly selective memory', as if this were something other than the blatant propaganda it's so obviously intended to be.

Come on, people. We're Liberals. We don't kick people when they're down and we don't pick on the mentally impaired. Where's your compassion? Your common sense? Your enlightened humanity? Your olives? (This martini needs something....)

Brooks throws these things off the top of his head because he's an idiot and it's the best he can do. We shouldn't be shaming him by pointing out his totally illogical reasoning, his love for anti-democratic authoritarians, or--as in this case--his assumption that women are nothing but baby-making machines and really ought to stop all this nonsense about 'careers' and get back to their natural role. He isn't being offensive, he's just dumb and doing the best he can.

Instead of taking him to task, we ought to be praising his ability to put two sentences together that don't cancel each other out--assuming this is one of those rare columns when he manages it. Or maybe help him out by suggesting a theme song that ought to be playing in the background as one reads his latest 12-minutes-from-thought-to-page opus. (Say, for this latest effort, 'Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed'.)

As for Hatch, it's not like he means it. He's just trying to defend his reality-challenged party's most recent Flagrant Power Play and he's not very good at it. We should give him better arguments. Suggest, for example, that he could write a follow-up piece explaining how filibusters cause hurricanes, impotence, and pattern baldness. Or we could fashion him a little flute out of blades of grass and present it to him as a way he might liven up his orations (teach him a jig to go with it--outstanding!) when the audience starts to boo, or worse--fall asleep. (For a good example of how this approach works in practice, see eRobin's response to the same Brooksian, um, effort.)

When you call attention to their inconsistencies, lies, corruption, ineptitude, and/or greed, you're making fun of their disabilities, and that's not like you. Let's think, now, kids, and be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves. Not everyone can be born with a standard brain and the ability to reason; so they're ignorant and bigoted and narrow-minded and autocratic? So what? So you never showed any flaws to the world? You--yes, the guy in the tie-dyed tie. You didn't understand Relativity until you were in high school, so you're not perfect either. And you, over there. No, no, the one next to you in the Gucci peasant skirt. You played 'Puff the Magic Dragon' until the grooves were worn down to a nub, so you're in no position to throw stones either, glass-house-wise.

Charity, campers, charity. Let's get with it. I want everybody to pledge right now to say at least one kind thing about one right-wing fruitcake this week. I know it won't be easy but we've got to start somewhere. Here's mine:

I have it on very good authority that David Brooks has learned to use a fork and can now eat all by himself. Attaboy, Dave! I'm proud of you. Keep up the good work. Now let's see if we can get that potty-training thing worked out....

The recent decision by a Federal judge that the stickers advertising creationism in biology textbooks used in Georgia's Cobb County were unConstitutional has, of course, sparked a response. What has been heartening to me is the reaction in Georgia itself. Reading through the comments on what the AJC pathetically calls its 'blog' (proving that, as usual, the print media has absolutely no idea what blogs are), the number of responses praising the decision far outnumbered those condemning it.

Of course, that's Atlanta, which is a city and therefore full of sin and apostasy, but the responses seemed to come from all over the state. Here are a few of them.

THANK GOD! It’s a shame how far back on the evolutionary scale we seem to be in Georgia. It’s about time people learned the difference between a “theory” and a “hypothesis”; the sticker in a science text book is the last place the two terms should be confused!

It’s about time Georgia stepped into the 21st century. I think it reflects poorly on our state that in 2005, people are still treating the widely accepted theory of evolution as a “maybe.” Instead of simply writing off the possibility of evolution, maybe people should attempt to accomidate thier beliefts AND scientific realities.

Wonderful! With so many recents steps backward in this country, its terrific that the separation of church and state is being protected!

Finally! That level of stupidity was humiliating the whole state!

Finally!! I am sure this isn’t over, unfortunately. What a great decision. Maybe we can now teach science in a science class, and leave religion for home and church, like good schools do.

Hooray! The courts once again to the rescue of educated people. When will the ultra-conservatives stop trying to put their brand of religion anywhere and everywhere?

Separation of church and state does not equal discrimination of relgious beliefs. Some Christians feel that evolutionism is an atheist belief. Therfore, allowing only evolutionism in schools is discriminating against Christian belief of the origins of humans. As a consitutional right, all people have the right of freedom of religion. Forcing the particular teaching of evolutionism without giving other views as an option is discrimination against Christians and forcing the atheist view on everyone. Any scientist knows that theories cannot totally be proven correct 100 percent - including evolution. We should be more open minded to allow our children to think instead of telling them what we want them to believe.

It may be hard to understand, but I do believe in evolution, but I also believe in the fundamental right to hear both sides of the story so I can make up my own mind.

One word suffices: Cobblodytes!

But it was, as usual, the creationist defenders who were more entertaining, from harping on the word 'theory' to stern warnings that 'GOD is watching' to this little gem:

If we let them teach evolutionary now, what next? Big bangs? I have read the bible from COVER TO COVER (except for job) and guess what athesists? I found NO evidence of evolutionism existing now or EVER? In fact you might be interested in the fact that the word “evoluton” is not even IN the bible ANYWHERE. Looks like the ol public schools have failed again!

So much for electricity, cars, and--as another commenter had it--'compters'.

Let me clear things up for you guys, evolution is a THEORY. Now what does THEORY mean, you ask? Well it means that it has no basis in realilty. Guess what, its my theory that the earth is made of chocolate! horray! Let’s go teach that to our children now because its a theory! do some RESEARCH PEOPLE. Evolution was invented by some guy like FIFTY YEARS ago, BEFORE compters. If it is such a fact, why did it take so long for us to think it up?

It's my theory that such logic on the part of the Red States explains how the worst president in US history, worse even than Grant, got himself re-elected despite overwhelming evidence of incompetence and corruption: sheer willful ignorance. Darwin would probably be surprised to find that, for some in Georgia at least, he has become 'some guy' and a contemporary of Jonas Salk.

Telling people want they want to hear is a powerful political tool--unscrupulous and dangerous when it revolves around lies and promoting, encouraging, or validating ignorance, but powerful nevertheless. The radicals now running the Pubs would appear to be that unscrupulous. What's even scarier is that they would appear to be that ignorant.

Well, let's see. Al 'I'll never support torture except when I support torture' Gonzales is going to be confirmed as the nation's highest legal officer without a whimper of protest; the Abu Ghraib trials are swirling around a low-level MI officer in a desperate attempt to keep the focus away from the people at the top who planned it, sanctioned it, and ordered it; and now a Publican Congress that came within inches of approving torture outsourcing has--at the express order of the Emperor's minions--removed restrictions on interrogations that would have forbidden the use of torture by American intelligence officers, restrictions that had passed in the Senate 96-2.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress saying that the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the war on terrorism" because it is unnecessary.

The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of the military or intelligence bills.

So can we say now, out loud, that the Emperor approves of torture? Or does he have to be caught in the act of actually attaching electric charges to prisoner testicles first?

Andy? Glenn? Josh? Rush? Sean? Annie? Mr Safire? Mr Kristol? Mr O'Reilly? Any response?

(Thanks to Melanie at Bump [see previous post] for the link. Mel keys on this graf:

In interviews on Wednesday, both Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican negotiator, and Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democratic negotiator, said the lawmakers had ultimately decided that the question of whether to extend the restrictions to intelligence officers was too complex to be included in the legislation.

Translation: trying to legislate against torture is too hard. My head hurts. Try not to get "detained" until next year, maybe we'll have it figured out by then.

What a pretty picture: the same legislators in whose hands we place the incredibly complex annual budget find a few simple restrictions against torture too confusing to deal with.

Methinks that what really confuses them is figuring out how to say 'No' to an emperor.)

Update: Kathy at RTOP has a much more complete and thoughtful post on this subject than mine--not unusual by itself. She runs down the steps of the BA's positions and concludes:

Okay. So now we have an official statement from a member of Bush's cabinet saying that there is no policy protecting prisoners from these extreme forms of interrogation, i.e. from torture. That's a distinctly different position than the one taken by Gonzales in his nomination hearings.

Check it out.

Melanie at Just a Bump on the Beltway is in the same kind of trouble with her electricity bill that I was in with my phone bill a couple of months ago. If you don't know Bump, you should. Melanie scours the papers in the morning--and throughout the day--and posts long excerpts of the day's fundamental news stories as well as her own pungent commentary. You can save yourself a passle of time running through the papers yourself, and still be up to speed. (Sometimes I think she's risking serious conflict with the Fair Use Doctrine, but I have to admit that the length of her excerpts is very convenient.)

If you do know Bump, then you'll understand why I'm asking you to visit and throw a few bucks in her tip jar (PayPal button at upper left corner) to help pay her electric bill. Like me, she's spent the Bush Years being un- or underemployed and the squeeze is on. A couple bucks from everybody would help enormously. I found that out when you saved my sorry butt before Thanksgiving.

Do what you can, and thanks.

Jerome a Paris at Moon of Alabama wrote what may--or may not--be a tongue-in-cheek complilation of the usual gripes against the Boomer Generation.

- they have grown up in a time of major growth, thus living their childhood in ever-improving prosperity and in an atmosphere of progress and economic optimism.
They were thus the first generation to have the luxury to revolt against the materialistic preoccupations of their parents while fully benefiting from these material advantages (and not having lived through the Depression and war like their parents)

- they had the incredible chance of living their 20s after the pill and before AIDS, thus being the first generation (and only one so far) able te enjoy sex without limitation and almost without consequences;

- after having experimented with abandon every kind of ideology and -isms, made divorce, single-parent families and criminality grow exponentially, and been generally irresponsible for most of their life, they have lately become "born-again" and are trying to push back medieval morality on the rest of the population ("family values", "war on drugs", welfare reform)

- after having sent their black or poor neighbors fight the Vietnam War, they discredited their military until a few terrorists smacked them in the face, and it suddenly became fashionable - and necessary - for them, fully in power, to use the full force (and more) of the US military to kick Arab ass indiscriminately

And so on.

Since I don't know if Jerome is serious, I'm not going to aim this at him but at all the people who have made--and believed--similar charges in the years since.

First, Jerome is repeating the spin put on the 60's by conservatives who hated every minute of it, even if they weren't there for it. From the very beginning ('they have grown up in a time of major growth, thus living their childhood in ever-improving prosperity and in an atmosphere of progress and economic optimism') the assumptions he makes aren't true. Prosperity was NOT 'ever-improving'; it was severely threatened from '64 on by the Viet Nam War, which skewed the economy almost entirely toward defense industries to the exclusion of almost everything else. Yes, we were sure we would be able to find jobs, but doing what? The openings were all in the military/industrial complex, helping the war machine to purr. We didn't want them.

It's hard to know where to begin with a mythology this wrong. It's always difficult for present-day folk to judge a past they didn't live through, and the 60's are particularly difficult because so much has changed since then. It's probably hard for irony-laced Gen-Xers and cynical post-modernists to imagine, given that money and the making of it is their locus, but the 60's weren't about economics, optimistic or otherwise. They were about ideals and getting the country to live up to them. Our optimism was tied up intimately with a belief that America could and finally should be made to honor its promise as a place where equality was more than a slogan and social equity was more than a 'dream' for some distant day down the road. Our 'irresponsible' crime was to insist that we wanted it NOW, that it had been delayed by the forces of the status quo for long enough.

Our idealism didn't come from nowhere. Martin Luther King's bus boycott in Montgomery was the beginning of an awakening for all of us. Then Jack Kennedy asked us to think about what we were going to give the nation instead of what we could get from it. Then Jack was murdered and Lyndon Johnson used the power of a crisis presidency and his bone-deep knowledge of Congressional rules and the Congressmen who made them to ram through the Great Society Programs, challenging us to end poverty, hunger, and hopelessness. Those are the things the Boomer counter-culture was responding to, along with the tape-your-mouth-shut enforced silence of rabid 50's conformism.

You have to understand that we grew up in a time when great social changes were brewing--thanks to Jack, Martin, and Lyndon--even as our parents were plotting, planning, and demanding small, safe, trivial lives for us. We weren't rebelling because we could afford to, economically; we were rebelling because we saw those planned futures as a living death. We wanted to be with Bobby and Martin and Jesse, marching for equality for Negroes who had been denied it for generations; we wanted to stop a senseless war that by '65 we knew was founded on a lie; we wanted to free women from their status as married slaves who couldn't even buy a used car unless their husband signed the note for them. What we desperately didn't want was to be tied down for the rest of our lives in some crowded office, our hours regimented, our work meaningless, our relationships empty of any real feeling. We wanted to be where the action was, and we wanted to help change the country. Forever.

That idealism extended to our personal lives. We didn't do dope because we wanted a buzz; we did dope because it opened doors in our minds and enriched experience in entirely new ways. We learned from it. Today's dopers are exactly the oppisite. Where they search for altered consciousness, a way of deadening the emptiness of their lives, we searched for altered realities, a way of seeing--and feeling--what was beyond and above the limited reality we knew. Drugs weren't the escape they are now, they were the path to new worlds. We were explorers of the spirit, not just the body.

Which explains the sexual revolution as well. I got news for you: the pill wasn't widely available until late in the 60's. As late as 1967--when the sexual revolution was in full swing--Bill Baird was arrested in Boston for 'Crimes Against Chastity'; he was handing out the pill on the BU campus. The sexual revolution wasn't driven by the pill; the pill was driven, at least in part, by the sexual revolution. We weren't fucking freely because the pill made it possible but because we were rebelling against the lifelessness of the 50's notion of sex as a joyless act intended to be performed only in the missionary position and only for the purpose of baby-making, and otherwise a disreputable, unseemly, noxious waste of time that no decent person would ever sanction.

That view was larded with such a heavy weight of hypocrisy that it was laughable. Prostitutes were flourishing by servicing 'good family men' who couldn't get laid at home or wouldn't fuck their wives because it was 'dirty'--the 50's were sexually choked with the whore/Madonna dichotomy. Meanwhile the women were having affairs with the local tennis pro or the local golf pro or the guy who came to read the electric meter, and wolfing down tranqs and martinis to get through another night with the hubby they 'loved' but didn't like very much. The hypocrisy was so thick you could give somebody a concussion hitting them with it; is it any wonder we thought there had to be a better way?

We grew up watching our parents learn to hate each other, watching our fathers shrink into ever-smaller lumps of craven toady doing jobs they hated but hung onto, blaming us for making them have to stick ('I'm only doing this for my family'), watching our mothers turn into shrewish and demanding drunks and pill-poppers because they were stuck in a loveless marriage and the society allowed them no other options, blaming us for making them stick (I'm only staying with him for the kids' sake'). The extreme conformity demanded by the 50's created the 60's, not 'economic prosperity'. That's ridiculous.

It's true that a lot of Boomers turned tail and ran in the mid-70's, turning their backs on everything they had once said they believed in order to go for the Gold. I've had a hard time forgiving them myself. But you need to understand an overwhelming truth about the 60's: we broke the back of segregation forever, turned 6000 years of tradition upside down by freeing women from the bonds of home and making it a choice instead of the only thing they were allowed to do, and for the first time in recorded history, the people stopped a war. Stopped it. Nixon drug it out a few more years until he could pretend it was his idea, but it wasn't. It was us. We made him do it, and everybody knew it. And because we did all those things, we were hated.

Hated. You can't imagine the level of hatred aimed at us unless you lived through it. Even people who thought we were doing the right thing and agreed with us hated us for actually doing it. From the point of view of almost everyone, we were recklessly tearing the society they had known into pieces and strewing them about like so much used tissue paper, treating everything they believed in as if it was disposable, irrelevant, trivial. They hated us for our 'lack of respect for tradition', for 'moving too fast', and for destroying the rules of their lives and the fabric of their culture without offering anything to replace it. That was a mantra in those days, 'What are you going to replace it with?' and our answer, while honest, was equally iconic: 'I don't know. Something better.'

It wasn't good enough. It proved our irresponsibility, as far as they were concerned, but what else could we say? We knew that what we were taking down had to come down--sexism, racism, and pointless militarism were evil, and if we could end them, it was our responsibility to do so no matter what the consequences. But as far as what was going to rise to take their place? How could we know? We were all in truly virgin territory. No one in the history of the Western world had ever done what we were doing--forcibly, deliberately deconstruct the evils of their society peacefully; no guillotines or armed revolts that replaced a King with an Emperor...or worse. A rebellion that succeeded in unhinging the evil aspects in a culture while leaving the rest of the culture intact? Nobody knew how that would play out; nobody could know. What we understood at the time was that nobody ever would know, either, until somebody made room for something new.

It was a messy, bloody business. People died, and not just in Nam. Civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi; students were shot down in Ohio by the National Guard; at least a dozen demonstrators died from head wounds sustained during the police riot in Chicago; four children were killed when a black church was bombed in protest for the congregation's activity in advocating voting rights. The country was in an uproar for ten solid years, between the civil rights actions and the anti-war demonstrations, and we were the cause of that instability. For that, people hated us.

Our own families hated us. There are breeches that were born in those days between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, that remain unhealed to this day, as much because they interpreted our passion and our refusal to back down as selfish and irresponsible narcissism as because they disagreed with our tactics or goals. The worst sin of all, in the eyes of many, was that we weren't just leveling the society they knew but that we were patently having fun doing it.

And we were, but not for the reason they thought. They thought we found it fun because we were enjoying their pain or reveling in destruction. That wasn't it at all. The fact is that fighting for what you believe is FUN. I have never felt more alive than I did then except for the time I got lost in the Yucutan for six months. Exploring the boundaries of your inner self is FUN, especially if you come at it with a modicum of willingness to enjoy everything, even the faults you discover. Trying to change the world using nothing more than your body and your voice is FUN.

What they all have in common is the challenge. We stretched every muscle, every brain cell, to its breaking point. That's what was fun. Those arrayed against us defined 'fun' as something you had on your day off. 'Fun' was frivolous, meaningless, childish activity. We knew there was more to it than that. We knew that the essence of real fun lay in living up to our potential as much as we could, in taking on new fights, impossible tasks, and putting everything we had into making them work, whether personal or public. But they saw our fun as a slap in the face: it was an insult to be seen having fun while you were destroying civilization as we know it. They hated us for that more than for anything else we did, I think, and you can hear the echoes of that hatred in the way Jerome framed his list.

Hatred of us was so intense that death threats were not uncommon. Well, very few can live with that kind of hatred forever. Eventually most of those who suffer it will concede defeat and try to pacify the haters by doing what they want. The sell-out in the 70's was a sign of that pacification. We were tired of being hated for what we had done, but mostly we were tired of what society did with what we had done. In the words of Terrence Mann, James Earl Jones' character in Field of Dreams, when he's trying to explain why he, the penultimate 60's activist, had turned his back on it in the 70's and 80's:

I was the East Coast distributor of involved. I ate it, drank it, breathed it. Then they killed Martin and Bobby. They elected Tricky Dick twice. And now people like you think I must be miserable because I'm not involved any more. Well, I got news for you. I spent all my misery years ago. I've got no pain left for any of you. I gave at the office.

That's a bit extreme but the sentiment is there. We'd had enough. We thought we'd won only to discover that to all appearances we'd lost after all. We'd been hated for nothing, given up everything for nothing, had had, for all the disruption and fireworks, no actual effect. If anything, we had driven people backwards, back into the arms of control freaks and paranoids like Nixon. At least that's how it seemed at the time.

Maybe it's understandable, then, that some of us said 'Fuck it' and decided to get what we could. Why not? We'd earned it. In hatred, if nothing else. There comes a time when, after years of being accused of something you haven't done, you figure since everybody already thinks you did it, you might as well go ahead and do it.

Look, we didn't always live up to our own standards. We didn't always follow through on our principles or maintain our integrity. Some of us sold out, for whatever reason, and even the few of us who didn't made our share of mistakes. But say what you want, at least we tried, and in the process we put something into the air in America that had never been there before--a belief in justice and an acknowledgement that the US had sometimes betrayed its promise. We ended segregation and dealt body blows to racism and sexism from which they will never recover, and we didn't do that because we had nothing better to do, like make money.

We were the last generation of idealism, the last with hope, the last that believed it could change the world. That that may be gone from this nation now is a damn shame, not something the present, oh so sophisticated and practical generations, ought to be crowing about. It is a great loss, and America may not survive it. The planet may not survive it.

Republicans, as of last week's state election, now own all three branches of Georgia state govt, and they're wasting no time proving how little regard they have for the principles of democracy or the spirit of their own state constitution, let alone the US one. In a fever of arrogance, the Georgia House Pubs have re-written the House rules so that radcon Pubs will rule the House, even to the expense of moderates in their own party. One can't help but think that this is going to prove a precursor to the rules we'll end up with in the Washington House, which is currently in the process of doing the same thing for the same reason: to cut Democratic legislators out of the legislative process entirely--screw the peoople those Dems were elected to represent. If they elected Democrats, they don't deserve representation, it's that simple. And screw the US Constitution while you're at it. Why not if it gets in your way?

The rules changes are pure power-plays with two main objectives. The first is cutting Democrats out of the loop, and the second is putting all power in the hands of the House Pub leadership. The linchpin is a novel concept: legislative 'hawks', and you have to read this to believe it.

The new House rules let Richardson appoint legislative "hawks" who can swoop in to any committee with the authority to vote the way the speaker wants them to.

The rules do not specify how many "hawks" Richardson can name, but he said there will probably be no more than two or three. Democrats immediately bristled, arguing the move guarantees Republicans can win any dispute in committee. "I hear them crying," Richardson told reporters later. "I promise we're not going to abuse this."

Yeah, right. Anybody who believes that:

My name is Ocho Abacha and I am the eighth son of former dictator Sonny Abacha. I have $27Mil tied up in Nigerian banks. For a mere $867 filing fee, I will pay you one-third of the $27M if you help me transfer the money into your account. Just click the PayPal button and deposit your $867 dollars into my account, and I will send you all the appropriate paperwork. In only a week or two, you will be a $$millionaire$$!

People who believe anything the Pubs say after a solid quarter-century of nothing but sleazy tricks and bare-faced lies deserve to lose their democratic rights.

Legislative 'hawks' aren't the only change, but the others aren't much better. One echoes the US House in keeping ethics violations (of Republicans, naturally) secret; another allows bills to be 'engrossed'--protected from amendment changes.

I can hear Denny Hastert now, slavering at the idea of 'hawks' in the US House. From Georgia's mouth to Hastert's ear.

It's a Brave New World, a Republican World, and it's time for us to secede. Enough is enough, already.

Those of us involved with or appreciative of the arts and cognizant of their value to enriching the human spirit have wondered for years what's behind their inherent fragility in our educational system. It's true that when public education began it had to fight long-standing religious and agrarian beliefs that education was frivolous, an 'extra' that got in the way of the 'real' purposes of life: working and child-rearing. It's also true that beneath that layer of hard-nosed simplicity lurked something darker--a lingering distaste for and distrust of the human spirit itself. To a people with Calvinist and Lutheran ancestors who lived close to the land, 'art' represented the ultimate debauchery of hedonistic impulses, a descent into the abyss of selfishness and emotional narcissism that was a fundamental enemy of civilization as they conceived it, a return to the animal magnetism they had fought for a thousand years.

All that is true as far as it goes, and important to understanding the American disdain for 'eggheads' and intellectualism, but it doesn't explain why, after almost 150 years of compulsory education, the most educated populace in the world, and decades of lip-service intended to verify the glories of an education and its necessity to modern human beings, we still maintain that bedrock core of barely-disguised hatred for and disgust with any part of education not directly related to getting a job. Some have labored mightily over the last five or six decades to foster an understanding of the importance of a well-rounded education, and while their efforts have been somewhat successful, they have been concentrated on teachers while parents and school administrators tend to remain at least passively hostile: starting an arts program, even as an extra-curricular activity, still always involves a fight with administrators and sharp questions from many parents about whether or not it's really 'necessary' and how exactly learning to play the violin is going to help Susie get a job as an investment banker when she grows up.

Through the 90's, I tried to build a career for myself as an acting and writing teacher--my only genuine skills. I'm very good, paritcularly with adolescents--that most troublesome of school groups--but I don't have a college degree, which meant that I had to find work in the cracks: teaching night classes, for instance, or as an artist in residence, or directing the school play and turning the rehearsals into de facto classes. Before Junior's tax giveaway to the rich, manufactured deficit, and costly but unnecessary war eliminated all the 'extra' Federal money that was paying for such things, I spent ten years on the outskirts of the educational system. It proved to be a particularly valuable experience for the purpose of understanding the way Americans split their belief in education into two parts: the crucial and the dispensable.

At the time it all fell apart, I was on the point of formulating what I thought was a fairly radical explanation that went beyond the simplistic 'It's our Puritan heritage' slogan and got closer to the heart of what was really going on: the arts challenge our basic American assumptions about life whereas we conceive of schools as the place where those assumptions are reinforced. In other words, learning to make your inner life richer and to express your emotions invariably makes you question those very emotions and everything in your life that gave rise to them. That's bad enough, but the idea of 'questions' alone goes against everything we think schools ought to be: the place where you get answers, and the simpler the better.

It turns out I'm not the only one who's noticed this. In last week's LAT (sorry about the delay but it took that long to percolate), Elliot W. Eisner, a professor of education and art at Stanford University, published an article in which somebody people will listen to finally tries to face the facts.

One of the casualties of our preoccupation with test scores is the presence — or should I say the absence — of the arts in our schools. When they do appear they are usually treated as ornamental rather than substantive aspects of our children's school experience. The arts are considered nice but not necessary. Just what do the arts have to offer to our children? Are they really important? Put most directly, what do the arts have to teach? Join me on a brief excursion.

First, the arts teach children to exercise that most exquisite of capacities, the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules. There is so much in school that emphasizes fealty to rules. The rules that the arts obey are located in our children's emotional interior; children come to feel a rightness of fit among the qualities with which they work. There is no rule book to provide recipes or algorithms to calculate conclusions. They must exercise judgment by looking inside themselves.

A second lesson the arts teach children is that problems can have more than one solution. This too is at odds with the use in our schools of multiple choice tests in which there are no multiple correct answers. The tacit lesson is that there is, almost always, a single correct answer. It's seldom that way in life.

A third lesson is that aims can be held flexibly; in the arts the goal one starts with can be changed midway in the process as unexpected opportunities arrive. Flexibility yields opportunities for surprise. "Art loves chance. He who errs willingly is the artist," Aristotle said. Creative thinking abhors routine. Routines may be good for the assembly line, where surprise is the last thing you want. As our schools become increasingly managed by an industrial ethos that pre-specifies and then measures outcomes, there is an increased need for the arts as a counterbalance.

The arts also teach that neither words nor numbers define the limits of our cognition; we know more than we can tell. There are many experiences and a multitude of occasions in which we need art forms to say what literal language cannot say. When we marry and when we bury, we appeal to the arts to express what numbers and literal language cannot. Reflect on 9/11 and recall the shrines that were created by those who lost their loved ones — and those who didn't. The arts can provide forms of communication that convey to others what is ineffable.

Finally, the arts are about joy. They are about the experience of being moved, of having one's life enriched, of discovering our capacity to feel. If that was all they did, they would warrant a generous place at our table.
(emphasis added)

Read over that list again and you'll see that each and every one of Eisner's 'lessons' is in direct conflict with everything else the school is teaching:

• Schools function by rules; art teaches you to break them.


• Schools work hard to dampen or kill emotions because emotions are dangerous to proper 'order' and control; art lets them loose.


• 'Teaching to the test' means inculcating students with a blind acceptance of the 'There's only one right answer to any question' approach to education; art teaches you just how limited--if not utterly bogus and bereft of essential human truth--such an approach is.

And so on.

In other words, the arts are antithetical to the style of education we've decided to favor. They oppose it, undermine it, and often show it up as a fraud. Teenagers are drawn to the arts not just because they're 'glamorous' although that's certainly part of the attraction, but because they confirm what many of the kids feel: that high school doesn't have a whole lot to do with their real lives or the issues they struggle with every day. Arts don't make rebellion more manageable, they give it teeth and sharp claws. If you can keep the arts off in a corner somewhere, like a sort of educational leper colony, you can keep them from infecting the rest of the system with their loathsome openness and endless questioning.

The proof is in the lack of dialectical tension you usually find in a charter school built around the arts. Worcester has one, and a project I did there gave me a chance to see how it operated. It was a revelation.

In the arts schools, the whole pattern and teaching methodology is different, starting with the way the school day itself is arranged: it's looser, more flexible, less rigidly controlled by the infamous 'bell' (or actually, these days, more normally a really annoying buzzer). There are a few more minutes between classes and teachers can extend their class a bit in order to bring at least temporary closure to a lively discussion. Everything else follows the same pattern: more flexibility. Curricula flow as much from the directions class discussions take as from the course syllabus; literature classes may include discussions of biology and science classes may require the reading of novels. All the usual strict compartmentalization of knowledge fields on which standard American education is based is thrown out the window and replaced by a synthesis that acknowledges that nothing exists in a vacuum and that there are multiple possible answers to any given question, depending on the variables involved.

Do I have to tell you that not only is there a long waiting list of kids wanting to get accepted but an even longer waiting list of teachers who want to work there?

The reason the arts aren't an integral part of the American educational system is simpler and more basic than inherited Puritanism or latent anti-intellectualism: the whole system would have to be reformed to accomodate them because if it wasn't, they would ultimately destroy it. That may be a desirable result for some of us but reactionaries and conservatives get nervous and/or outraged at the very notion of change, however minor. A from-the-ground-up sea-change from a focus on solid, simple, single answers to constant questioning and the instability of doubt would make them apoplectic, and they're the ones administrators worry about; they're noisy. Living in fear does that to you.

Yet such a change is exactly what the new generations will need. The simple answers that have defined American ignorance are what created George Bush, the neocons, and enormous corporate power, as well as allowing SUV's and the Iraq war for oil. Such thinking is, as we are learning every day, NOT helpful. What we need to survive the final--and necessary--loss of our innocence is generations of kids trained to think around corners, make complicated decisions after weighing convoluted options, and face uncomfortable facts--exactly the skills art teaches and standard education avoids. So what are we doing instead? Killing arts programs all over the country and concentrating on teaching a style of thinking that virtually guarantees our demise as a great power. Naturally.

Maybe we should re-think that decision. Oh wait-- That's right, I forgot: we don't know how.

(Special thanks to Kath for igniting this whole line of thought.)