Understanding The Anti-Reason Hysteria Of The Republican Party

Recently, Paul Krugman began a New York Times column on the anti-science and anti-intellectual stance of today’s GOP by quoting Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, wherein he stated that the Republican Party is quickly becoming the “anti-science party.” Most people haven’t heard of Huntsman, Republican pariah-in-residence. And even if they do, they probably won’t listen to him. Why? Because he’s reasonable, and there is simply no room for that trait in the Tea Party movement’s hellish and destructive crusade within the GOP.

As the Tea Party has gained momentum, reason has evaporated into the ether and has been replaced with polarizing rhetoric often with a religious flair. We’ve seen this with Sarah Palin’s spurious “death panel” remarks during the debate over Obamacare, Rick Perry’s prayer-based solution to a Texas drought, and Michele Bachmann’s more recent claims that, no matter how much she tries to palliate them with shrill and off-putting laughter, God has had a substantial role in the recent earthquakes as well as Hurricane Irene. Digging a bit deeper, former President George W. Bush, the Connecticut-coddled kid with a specious Texan drawl, kindled the polarization flame again with his famous 2001 appeal to the US Congress where he stated, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” And then with the nightmare that was the debt ceiling “talks,” we’ve witnessed a party willing to drive its country into the dirt over something more powerful than reason: their beliefs.

In this unfortunate political arena, reason — the pesky little tool that separates us from flea-picking baboons — has no place. What we see unfurling now in the Republican Party and in the remarks of its primary presidential frontrunners is not the result of reason, but rather Christian fundamentalists who pit their God against science and research in a fight they are determined to win. And that, like Krugman said, is terrifying. But it is also something that, for better or worse, is not new in the American story; it is part of our tradition.

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Teaching In New York City

The Article: Confessions of a bad teacher by John Owens at Salon.

The Text: By the time we sang “The Star–Spangled Banner” in 9th grade English, it was too late to save me. So I didn’t even try to keep the kids quiet, and joined the class as they burst into song.

Almon, an A-average boy whose parents had emigrated from the Dominican Republic by way of Milwaukee, was absolutely sure our national anthem includes the lyric “cheese bursting in air.”

Daria, who came from Honduras just a few years ago and was struggling with English, was gamely singing, trying to guess what words would be appropriate for a song about her new country. “Nice!” “Nice! In air!”

Sarah, the daughter of Ghanese immigrants, got every word right and hit every note with church-choir perfection. And from Rikkie, the highly intelligent, perhaps brilliant, boy, whose father is serving six years in an upstate prison, to Cristofer, a skinny kid who fancies himself a Puerto Rican tough (“I didn’t even cry when my father died”), to A’Don, whose mother doesn’t speak English, to Michael, whose father doesn’t speak English, to Macon, who only seems to care about basketball, we sang loud, we sang laughing, we sang whatever words we knew, and we sang for all we were worth.

Considering that there’s no daily Pledge of Allegiance in New York City public schools, and that American flags are almost as scarce, the class did quite well.

“The dawn’s early light” hadn’t echoed off the linoleum floor before an administrator and a school aide were in the doorway ready to quell this “disruption,” as they did with so many of my classes.

But it was this high-spirited, everybody-participates approach that made the 9th Grade Writing Workshop a joy for me. And, I believe, for my students.

Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.

It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.

And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”

In other words, I was a bad teacher.

From Michael Bloomberg to Bill Gates to hedge-fund-enriched charter school backers, the problem with our schools is bad teachers. With salaries sometimes surpassing $100,000, summers off and “job for life” tenure, it’s easy to believe that our schools are facing a bed-bug-caliber infestation of bad teachers.

Amid all of this, I thought I could do some good. I am a middle-aged white guy from the suburbs, but I’m not lazy. I’m not crazy. I’m good with kids, and I love literature.

During a three-decade career as a writer, editor and corporate executive, I traveled to more than 100 countries, met heads of state, and picked up wisdom that I thought was worth sharing. When I left publishing, I was senior vice president/group editorial director at Hachette Filipacchi Media (the bulk of which was recently sold to Hearst Magazines). Now, I was determined to make an impact directly with kids in the classroom, and I set out for the South Bronx.

Little did I know I was entering a system where all teachers are considered bad until proven otherwise. Also, from what I saw, each school’s principal has so much leeway that it’s easy for good management and honest evaluation to be crushed under the weight of Crazy Boss Syndrome. And, in my experience, the much-vaunted “data” and other measurements of student progress and teacher efficacy are far more arbitrary and manipulated than taxpayers and parents have been led to believe.

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How America Spreads Democracy To The World

Has America Betrayed The Legacy Of Martin Luther King?

“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell…”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King Memorial is a colossal block of granite, devoid of the emotion of the man it was meant to pay tribute. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse or how one of America’s most incandescent souls would have reacted to it. It’s big. There is that.

The last time Dr. King planned to return to the Washington Mall was as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, before his life was cut short on that shabby balcony at the Lorraine Motel. He was in Memphis in the spring of 1968 to support black sanitary public works employees as they demanded equal and fair pay.

Ironically, the MLK memorial was not built by union labor, it appears to have been built by what can only be called slave labor. As detailed by the Washington Post, workers were shipped over from China without pay to back up sculptor Lei Yixin as he chipped away at a giant chunk of rock from Greece.

I very much doubt that King would have minded the ethnicity of those workers. He wasn’t very big on patriotism as Edward Rothstein points out in his excellent critique of the memorial’s flaws. I do think that it’s safe to say that he would have objected quite strongly to the idea that those workers were being paid in “national pride” and cigarettes.

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It’s Just Verbosity To Me

A Sentence Of Sorts by Of Montreal off of Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?