Category Archives: Culture

We Should Stop Plowing Snow and Other Tales

Tom Foley has an article in today’s Hartford Courant that tries to cover the difference between a “current services budget” and a “current year budget.” Unfortunately, the author’s strived-for clarity never really develops and the logical premises for the argument are clouded by characterizations which the author never examines for their accuracy. He writes:

The current services budget is a concept that turns boring government accounting into “Alice in Wonderland” where bureaucrats, politicians and advocates for government spending can pitch their causes and confuse their constituents to suit their purposes.

I’m always amazed at how politicians ridicule themselves in their own expressions. Tom Foley, if memory serves, ran for Governor. He, therefore, is a politician. Secondly, he characterizes current politicians as “advocates for government spending,” a brute force tag that’s never actually supported in his article. If, for example, a politician advocates for modern plumbing in a public school is this person looking out for interests of children or are they a government spending advocate?

But now to the meat of the matter. Foley writes:

The current services budget is a projection of future revenues and spending that assumes tax policy and state services remain as they are in the current year. So, in planning for expenses for the next budget, it factors in anticipated wage and benefit increases for the same number of state workers and inflationary increases in the cost of things the government buys. It is heavily manipulated. The estimated current services budget for the general fund for the fiscal year ending in June 2012 is $1.75 billion higher than this year’s spending, an increase of 9.8 percent. This is ridiculous.

There are lots of accuracy questions here. First off, I’m not claiming that Foley is incorrect in the numbers. But the terms “heavily manipulated” and “ridiculous” are opinions. The reader would have to conclude a budget that anticipated reductions and saw lots of spending reductions would not be “ridiculous” and “would not be manipulated.” This language amounts to codes “politicians” use to “manipulate” an audience. Foley continues:

Using the current services budget degrades the clarity and quality of debate on the budget. It enables bureaucrats to pad budgets and move the goal line in the hope of achieving ever higher funding. It enables politicians to obscure bad news and fabricate good news. It enables advocates of government spending to demagogue anyone who questions the ever-increasing funding for their causes. It confuses the concerned citizen who is trying to understand what is going on.

Here, Foley continues to “characterize” rather than argue from premises. Budget’s are “padded,” they play football, they’re “fabricated,” and politicians are “demagogues,” and simply push “causes.” It may be that new plumbing at the schools, sound proofing, and winter snow clearing are causes and that politicians are indeed “demagogues” but Foley would have been more effective if he’d used evidence or even specific examples of “padding” and “demagoguery.” Honest disagreement can be had on these items.

I can consider my own house budget in comparison to the budget the state has to put together, as can other people, and those who don’t have work are in much much worse situation. Next year, for example, I will see major loss of purchase power for several reasons. The first is a personal hit to my paycheck, as I will not be seeing a raise and my paycheck has already been reduced. I will not, however, be victorious when I ask the local oil company to please see to a reduction in the price of home heating oil and so on. Oil will rise in cost no matter my “opinion.” Those improvements I looked forward to will not see fruition, either, which would have helped to reduce the cost of oil for me; note that the oil company is just as concerned as I am, as the driver of the truck will see his own pay cut also. In the mean time, I’ll call the local grocer and ask them if they could please reduce the price of milk and butter commensurate with my own diminishing return. Economically, it is difficult to tighten the belt in such a way that reducing outlay elsewhere will make up for the cost of rising prices across sectors as most people have few options for boosting revenue. I could, of course, cut out every unnecessary purchase or obligation. But this is where I connect to the macroeconomic world: demand across the economy would go down, making problems worse. The dudes at the wine shop are trying to make a living too and they’re supply chain reaches into Europe and South America.

One element Foley doesn’t cover, and this is rare in debates about “government spending,” is the vision of government’s role by people across the board (as a rich person, his worries are less when it comes to rising prices). Should it be the municipality’s responsibility to plow the streets? Or is it the individual’s role? At the turn of the century Hartford decided that it was its role to manage water supply to the population not private businesses (to the chagrin of business but to the profit of people who would not have had the means to pay for a company to lay pipe in their neighborhood). Partly, this had to do with ethical responsibilities and with efficiency. We could have honest debate about snow removal. I could simply pay for a plow company to do my section of the street (this, of course, would require government to dictate what my portion of the street actually is). Would this amount to higher costs or to lower? I would need help with that calculation. At this point in the day, all I have to call on is Plato’s Republic.

Final note:
In addition to the two opposing views on the electoral system, the Courant would have done a service to readers, the very kind of service Foley aspires to (“clarity of information”), if it had provided space for an opposing view on the budget.

Ironies of the Education Crisis: Stop Selling Hope

Angry Bear guest poster RJS has a sobering list of news on education budget crises responses across the nation. It’s very much worth reader attention. The writer notes the irony:

while there are those in congress who pretend to be worried about leaving debt for the next generation, they are leaving the next generation without the tools to compete in an increasingly challenging future…

There’s another side to the problem of any disrupted school year or block of school time. College admissions seasons are dependent on graduating classes from high schools. In other words, graduating classes set the tone for the two and four year schools, as freshman classes are a block, excluding transfers, that form an institutional narrative. Not all freshman will actually make it through to graduation at least in four years and six is a more typical average. Off the top of my head it’s probably less than a quarter of students who will finish a degree in four years and that’s probably a conservative number.

The problem, however, has to do with that representative student who enters grade school, then moves on to high school without having a mastery of the fundamentals (whatever this may mean. I have a good idea of what it means in my own experience, who started off as a good speller, then fell off that wagon in and about the fifth grade when I took it upon myself to stand on my chair during class and fell from the good graces of the school gods). That student and his or her class will go to college carrying non-mastery with them. A few bad years of grade school, for whatever reason, let’s say it’s cuts to music (and this student has talent for music) will carry through to freshman experience. I see this every day in my own teaching. And I see how difficult it is for students to develop a skill without prior reinforcement. Certain cognitive experiences cut across disciplines. (One item I won’t cover in this post is the relentless push for student to go to college in the first place, which is, I think, a problem as state learning standards don’t map well to the college expectation.)

This translates to generational damage that can’t really be repaired. It’s my own estimation that a “schooling/learning generation” is about seven to ten years: a senior in high school doesn’t have a lot in common with a fifth grader, in other words. Worse, a student can never have their fifth grade opportunities back. Once they’re gone they’re gone. Put in other terms, if a senior in high school doesn’t read Plato’s Republic, their experience of that text as a senior is gone “forever” once they graduate.

Cuts to school programming now will always prove a deficit for higher education in the future. People who don’t teach might suspect that classrooms filled with students who are just trying catch up is a more difficult teaching job. Good college teaching is about encouraging students to learn independently of guidance; if students have difficulty learning independently, they will certainly not be of much assistance to the team, to the boss, or to company, or to the lab, or to the non-profit. Opportunities for learning at school cannot be made up. If a class size goes from 20 to 40 for next year’s kids this effectively degrades learning opportunity and prohibits the effectiveness of teachers, whose decisions have already been hamstrung by testing culture. I’ve pretty much come to the decision that those things students learn in high school don’t prepare them for college work.

One mistake RJS makes in his conclusion is this question of the “challenging future,” which is a problem of logic. Let’s articulate a thesis: is any future more challenging than the futures of the past if people are given an honest opportunity to prepare for their daily lives (think Benjamin Franklin here)? Americans in 1860 certainly faced a challenging future, just as those Europeans who turned 1 in 1899 and would soon go to war.

We have years to guide us. I can’t say that any future will be more challenging than the next. I can stress to the people I know that if we take away opportunities now, those opportunities are gone and will never come back. This is what Lancaster as “Moonlight” Graham meant when he said that once it’s gone it’s gone, but at least he had other possibilities. We seem to be forgetting this in our endless memory loss.

I’ve been arguing that we have a learning crisis in the United States. This crisis has nothing to do with math scores. The crisis can be articulated in ironic terms: we want an educated population but we want it on a shoestring. If the counterargument to my claim is that we really really don’t have the money for competent public education, then my answer is this: stop selling hope and definitely stop selling practicality.

What Does Being Broke Mean

In this article at the LA Times (which I read in the paper copy of Hartford Courant), the authors quote from Rep. Tim Walberg, placing his quote in an argument frame:

Republicans argued Friday that Americans are willing to accept diminished social programs in return for a firmer fiscal standing.

“They understand in my district: We’re broke. If we don’t deal with this, we lose the social safety net,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from a southern Michigan district that voted for Obama. “I think they’re ready.”

The often repeated “we’re broke” assertion is common from the GOP. But, again, the last time I was at Best Buy, numerous people were at the store making purchases. In fact, I saw a fifty inch television being squeezed into a minivan. This casual observation can be used as evidence to make a counter point to Mr. Walberg. Indeed, if a deficit were some measure of “brokenness,” then every country on the planet would be broke.

Broke in my estimation means that Best Buy would close and that every dealership in the country selling Subarus would be eating 100 percent inventory. Indeed, I also read in the Courant that our local gambling houses shared over 30 million dollars of booty with the state in the month of March, which means that people are somehow finding plenty of money for slot play.

One of the ironies of the “we’re broke” meme is the implication by Walberg that the social safety net is something he’s actually concerned with. If this were so, then it would stand to reason that Congresspeople like Walberg would be promoting policies that boost the living wage and augment cultural investment.

On Relationships: Jobs, Money, Bubbles

A couple of interesting relationships in the paper this morning. There’s the report on UCONN’s raise in tuition which related to the article on college students and jobs.

Nationally, we’re due for major issues in graduation rates and matches in the job market, what I’d call a sort of degree bubble, though this isn’t the most accurate description. If there are more architects graduating than there are openings in architecture firms, then the architect must either wait for an opening or try something else. May/June graduations will be spirited until reality hits. How colleges and universities react or change will have a lot to do national policy coming out of Congress, though it may not be the responsibility of the college to have to worry about it, as a multi-decade problem has been brewing over the role of colleges and universities in the ecology of “quality of life.”

In terms of education, most of the students that I know and work with aren’t really sure why they’ve entered higher ed, other than it’s something they should be doing or need to do. Or they’re fallowing a now-common life narrative of birth, school, more school, then work. At my college, the money is less of an issue than it would be at a big money institution, where the debt load can be astronomical, though for many of my students low cost still equates to big money. The narrative is important as it relates to others, such as the loss of manufacturing jobs, which provided alternative means to a decent living after WWII. Now, recent high school graduates can either stay where they are (living however they’re living) or go to school, which confuses the role of higher education from the perspective of the personal (and live according to a future vision based on what exists now or how “now” is interpreted).

I remember when I graduated from high school. I would say something like, “I have to find a job.” Most people knew what this meant: it meant “dish washing” to make money for tuition at a relatively inexpensive state university. The reality at this point is that the college degree is in high demand. Whether the degree should be high demand is not my issue in this post. But I don’t think the persistent mantra of deficit reduction at the national level has much to do with the realities of this demand. It’s a simple mantra, that federal deficit cutting with create jobs. If this is true, I have to see the working syllogism. It seems to me that the more complicated and significant question is: what future economy will create demand for people with college or university degrees?

The Big Lie of the Day

The big lie of the day today, this Friday the 18th, as I work with html canvas code, is the cry all over the news that the United States is broke. In this country millions of people are out at the restaurant; they’re out in their cars buying gas and going about their business; they’re at the store buying groceries (I was at the store today purchasing lettuce, root beer, and tomatoes, and saw them doing this, too, one guy at the meat counter even ordered some deli). Best Buy and the Apple Store are probably packed. If the United States were broke, none of this would be happening.

If we were broke, Congresspeople would be at home guarding their water bottles, hunkering down in their holes. The problem as I see it is that currently budget and other policy insist on the status quo. There’s very little talk of raising top tier tax rates and finding some way to lower healthcare costs, which would probably create surpluses. Politicians know this. But they don’t want to direct their attention to these small matters. In all this mix, the housing bubble and the looming new tech bubble have been shoved under the carpet. Have real wages gone up in this country? Where is the money going? Not, I would argue, to pensions.

The lie of “the busted bank” is argued as having something to do with nature not policy. It’s the alignment of the stars, some argue; it’s the way things are so we must adapt and adopt.

Is John Boehner right when he asserts that Government borrowing is taking money away private interests? How so? Interest rates argue otherwise. But the economists can settle that question. If Wisconsin (and I mean this ironically) could find a way of controlling health care costs, this other budget nonsense about the “only way to solve” the problem would probably go away. Note that was no TARP for the states.

February 11, 2011

This is a special date, as so many dates are. And how appropriate that we’re covering Romanticism at the moment in British Literature II, where we converse about Blake and others in the context of the United States, France, Haiti, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Here’s to Egypt.

Tone, Discourse, and that Dreaded Rhetoric

I’ve read lots of “tone” in today’s papers. Civility, responsibility, guns, blame, and civil discourse have been the themes of the last week or so. Consider David Brooks in his essay titled Tree of Failure. In the column, Brooks’s tone can be considered civil and thoughtful. Here’s how he begins

President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.

He calls Barack Obama’s memorial speech “wonderful” and “uplifting.” He characterizes Obama’s approach as “an occasion as a national Sabbath.” The subject of the essay is his take on the “roots” of civility. He writes

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Brooks ties these ideas to “modesty” and a need to re-carve it into our relationships: “Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty,” he writes. He places “modesty” in contrast to “narcissism.” The frame for this “modesty” is wrapped in the language of Genesis: “But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness.” Finally, Brooks calls on the words of Reinhold Niebuhr to make his final appeal, which is an interesting choice.

In addition to Brooks, I took a look at Paul Krugman piece entitled A Tale of Two Moralities. I did this because I also read Charles Krauthammer’s piece Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons and I wanted to see why he comes down so hard on Krugman, which, of course, simply led to the reading of the essays.

Krugman begins his piece this way

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

Krugman’s thesis has to do with his difficult reconciliation might be given divisiveness. He writes,

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. . . . For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

The nature of this division, according to Krugman, has to do with points of view that can’t be squared. Here’s how he characterizes the differing views:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

These “characterizations” are generalized and I don’t necessarily agree with their implications. Having “a right to keep what they earn” doesn’t necessarily lead to charges of “tyranny.” In the first, “liberal” characterization, one doesn’t necessarily need to view a “progressive tax code” in context with “welfare state.” To place them back into Brooks’s scheme, we would need to ask “Who’s the narcissist?” which doesn’t seem like an appropriate question. In any event, it is possible to not to react with spleen to Krugman but to build an argument in disagreement. He ends the piece with this:

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

Here’s my disagreement. Developing the two sides and their points of disagreement would have been more helpful, especially on the technical nature of the issues, to Krugman’s thesis. Is it naive to say that we don’t spend enough time examining and debating whether this is that bolt size will do the job better? I think this Krugman’s point.

Charles Krauthammer’s Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons attempts to make the case that blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for the Arizona tragedy is unsupported by evidence and that those who do so are evincing their own style of “hallucination.” He begins the essay in a legal frame:

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.

To bring the point home, Krauthammer identifies those he believes have made the “charge” and then rounds things off with a repetition of the thesis

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

Krauthammer goes on to explore the apparent issue with the shooter, Loughner, and his mental health problems and then places martial metaphors in their context. He writes

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest.

When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at (it)” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

The above is a long quote, as I want to illustrate Krauthammer’s method. He ends the piece with a pointed expression at Krugman: “The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

I would make the case that Krauthammer’s fundamental point may be correct: that Loughner’s motivations might have been spurred by mental illness rather than by “politics.” I write “might” because the facts are actually not in as of yet. Krauthammer’s method, however, falls flat and makes his conclusion, which may indeed be hasty, very difficult to take as serious polemic. It would’ve been entirely agreeable to simply disagree with Krugman (or The New York Times, with what exactly about it’s reportage?) straight down the line instead of accusing the opposition of being delusional and “rabid” which draws in the specter of unnecessary ad hominem and a reflective charge of being “rabid” also. Why? Because it is possible to be incorrect without being delusional. Indeed, the approach should have been to establish exactly where the disagreement is because in Krauthammer’s case, as in Brooks’s and Krugman’s, it’s difficult to agree on the precise issue at hand.

Why I Dislike Holiday Breaks

One of the reasons I dislike holiday breaks is I dislike spending money. Sure, I’m somewhat of a miser, and in the spirit of being miserly I’ve stopped smoking cigarettes (well, I have snuck a few). The days of smoking are pretty much over. I don’t want to be unhealthy, either financially or physically. Rather, I’m looking forward to several months of the everliving hell of quitting.

The holidays are filled with strange hypocrisies. On the one hand, tis the season for spending lots of money and more debt accrual. On the other hand, though I’m not sure which hand it is, we’ll be hearing a lot in the next few months about how people don’t save enough, thus digging holes under future balloons and bubbles.

Another reason I dislike the holidays is that I forget what I should be doing. There’s a lot of work to do. I have clearing to do out back, woodwork around the house, and other house projects. I also disremember what I told myself I should be preparing for: new media program work, exam writing, course development. Oh, and then there was Rails.

I have been working on the courses, yes. In doing so, I’m already prepping for a redeploy of World Literature in the Fall with a strong redosing of Chinese history and study of intellectual traditions. Fritjof Capra has been helpful, as I can snag a few birds in his Tao of Physics volume. I’m not done with the book so I don’t want to make hasty assertions about what teleos might mean when we compare Relativity Theory and various elements of Taoism or Buddhism. One of the critical elements of Taoism is the notion of complementarity, hence the thrust of this post must be taken with complementarity.

I’m also reading Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a interesting path-choice comic, given to me by my step son. (Smokelessness, however, makes it hard to concentrate.)

I’m also working my way into Nicholas Carr’s post on interactive narrative. I think he’s right about the importance and potency of storytelling, but I find that the entryway into the interactive arts is unconvincing. Considering storytelling from the point if view of the critic and the apparatus is limiting. Again, I make the assertion that we need more readers and writers in the variety of forms. The “death of the author” meme is not, I don’t think, what writers are thinking about when they’re considering links, branches, and decisions.

Lastly, the worst thing about holidays is the fact that they end and that their liminal periods are difficult to pin down. Question then: are they particles or waves or both?

Coming Up From Under My Rock

I’ve come up from under my rock to check things out for a moment before squirming back under. That’s where I work.

But what’s up in the open air? Saw a commercial for a company that can’t hire a song writer and so it steals Harry Warren’s That’s Amore’. And there’s something called the Values Voters Summit but no one invited me. It’s a wonderful of example of argument by name or title. The Values Voters Summit. It’s a Summit, a Summit for Values Voters. I took a look and listened to some things I don’t think the speakers really believe. It’s an interesting thing to hear speaker after speaker speak their mind. It’s illuminating. Especially as we head into the deeps of Sir Gawain, where I’d much rather stay.

What was it that Twain wrote:

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.

and

For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon – laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication,
persecution – these can lift at a colossal humbug – push it a little –
weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to
rags and atoms at a blast.

And so back under the rock I go.

Why the War on Terror is a Dumb Idea

The weekend incidents on flights tell a strange story. Here’s a bit from McCLatchey on the Sunday incident:

The latest scare aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 involved what the airline described as a “verbally disruptive” passenger and triggered an examination of baggage on the Detroit tarmac to determine if there were explosives on the plane.

Although the passenger spent an “unusually long time in the aircraft lavatory” – an echo of the Christmas day incident — he was suffering from legitimate illness and is not viewed as a terrorist threat, the Department of Homeland Security later said.

Anyone in the world can disrupt a security zone. It could be Iraq, Texas, London, a small flight. Once the troops leave, one person can bring the old anxiety back simply by waiting. This is untrue of battles, which end, but may indeed erupt years later in a different form. Has the definition of war been changed to involve internal states of being?