The Question of Public Service and Public Education or Burn the Federalist

James Madison’s letter to W. T. Berry (1822) is interesting reading into some of thinking about the significance of public education. I’ve been reading a lot of historical documents recently given subjects of the day to grab some context, especially given the woes of public education in places like Chicago, where money keeps getting in the way of solutions. I’m still waiting for the “bailout” of the states in the same vein as the “bailout of the banks.”

It’s in this context that I fail to see the significance of some journalistic responses to Obama’s convention speech as “not all that great,” the theme of which focused in high points on the relevance of public service. Did the speech have to be fantastic? Barack Obama has already proven that he can give fantastic speeches. The narrative: Let’s wait for Obama’s fantastic speech, and somehow this will fix everything. This was exactly NOT the point of the speech (which was the genius of the speech). For the president to swoop in and solve all the ills of the world was exactly the opposite message. One commenter I heard on TV said that his speech was probably the 4th best. No standard was provided. Some people are supposed to have an opinion on the “waves.” We’re supposed to be smart enough to understand this.

Madison writes

But, besides the consideration when the higher Seminaries belong to a plan of general education, that it is better for the poorer classes to have the aid of the richer by a general tax on property, than that every parent should provide at his own expence for the education of his children, it is certain that every Class is interested in establishments which give to the human mind its highest improvements, and to every Country its truest and most durable celebrity.

And further on (anticipating the moieties perhaps created by standardized tests), he writes

But why should it be necessary in this case, to distinguish the Society into classes according to their property? When it is considered that the establishment and endowment of Academies, Colleges, and Universities are a provision, not merely for the existing generation, but for succeeding ones also; that in Governments like ours a constant rotation of property results from the free scope to industry, and from the laws of inheritance, and when it is considered moreover, how much of the exertions and privations of all are meant not for themselves, but for their posterity, there can be little ground for objections from any class, to plans of which every class must have its turn of benefits. The rich man, when contributing to a permanent plan for the education of the poor, ought to reflect that he is providing for that of his own descendants; and the poor man who concurs in a provision for those who are not poor that at no distant day it may be enjoyed by descendants from himself. It does not require a long life to witness these vicissitudes of fortune.

If we’re worried about money, then we should be assured by the question of all kinds of potential properties, even if teachers will be willing to forgo that prosperity in the short term for some for of pension in the future. Our country is of a size Madison could not probably have imagined. This does’t mean we shouldn’t weigh potential inflation (code for “state bailouts and give the teachers, the cops, and the fire people the raise they need”) against some sort of greater good in the name of public service.

Or we could say this: you know, we just can’t afford it. Then burn the Federalist and all Madison’s letters.

Lots of people will disagree with this:

Hire all the teachers, cops, firefighters you need and pay them the wage they need
Fund the research
Provide the loans
Change the rules around forming unions
Invest in that transit project
“Foster the useful arts”
Let anyone who wants in in
Leave peoples’ morality alone
Build those space ships (I love space x, but I also like my cordless drill)
Fine, support as much as the military wants, but let’s be reasonable
Get the banks back to banking
Speculation tax
Write your own list
But pay for it, if you know what I mean.

Cool Projects for Digital Humanities Grad Students

Here are a couple of projects for grad students in the digital humanities and new media. They’re things I’d like to do. Here goes:

When I read Henry Beston, I really have no idea of the landscape he’s talking about. He covers all kinds of issues: animal migrations, the intricacy of weather systems, and nuance of place change. This all needs to be mapped as an accompaniment to the text: where was he when he saw the spiders? I think this is all under water now?

A much larger project has to do with visualizing history in terms of maps from the point of view of search and place modeling. It’s a simple concept that would probably involve major money and time. Let’s say I go to a map search on the web and type in Battle of Manassas or Battle of Bull Run (depending on what part of the country you’re from). I should be able to go there and study it from angles or versions of choice, but the trick is that everything else has to be there too: the map “follows” the search into the past as a totality of the world, hence a true simulacrum. Likewise Rome, Greece, whatever. Small parts of this should be possible, even more possible with greater computer power on the way. This would be a synthesis of almost every academic discipline.

Another project could just be to GIS out Tolkien’s world. That would be fun.

The Real Problem (bullshit) with the Ryan Speech

There are a few critiques of Paul Ryan’s Wednesday speech that can now be defined as boilerplate. This does’t mean that they’re incorrect. Rather, it means that they don’t really go to the heart of the matter: sophistic manipulation. Juan Cole, for example, identifies the Janesville issue:

7. Ryan slammed President Obama for the closure of an auto plant that closed in late 2008 under George W. Bush. Ryan’s running mate, Mitt Romney, opposed Obama’s actual auto bailout, which was a great success and returned Detroit to profitability.

And here’s Jonathan Cohn at TNR:

It’s true: The plant shut down. But it shut down in 2008—before Obama became president.

Just an accuracy point: it didn’t shut down; it was shut down.

Both writers are responding to this Ryan segment:

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

While Cole and Cohn are factually accurate, Ryan never refers to the problem of a date, a segment of questionable time, or to cause and effect (on Wednesday, August 29, 2012). Ryan’s is a repetition, though less inaccurate, of another speech he gave in Ohio (on August 16th, 2012). In terms of cause and effect, the Ohio speech is more telling, as Ryan attributes the cause to Obama administration energy policies, which is demonstrably false, both anachronistically and in terms of factual policy effect (which, I assume, Ryan is well aware of. This is an example of a howler). In any event, the Ryan quote at the convention averts the date critique by concentrating instead on something else: the powerful accusation of betrayal. Ryan quotes Obama: ““I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.”” CNN has done a fact check of the “quote” and concludes:

The only thing Ryan appears to have gotten technically wrong in Wednesday’s version was saying that the plant didn’t last another year. It did last another year — more like 14 months — if the Isuzu line and its 57 workers count.
So, though Ryan might have been incorrect in the August 16 telling, he cleaned it up for Wednesday’s convention. Obama said what Ryan said he said.

They also miss the point, and I’m not referring to the 4 minus 2 algorithm. This example of fact checking is about as squishy as a slug. I love this part: “The only thing Ryan appears to have gotten technically wrong . . .” Otherwise, they miss the entire point. And just to push, CNN writes: “So, though Ryan might have been incorrect in the August 16 telling . . . ” What is the penchant for this passive form: “might have been incorrect . . . ” Just change it to: “So, though Ryan [was] incorrect in the August 16 telling . . .” Please.

Ryan has a method for using the quote that goes to Obama’s lack of commitment and trustworthiness to save a specific plant where school mates of Ryan worked. After all, Obama said the plant “would be open for another hundred years.” Well, not really, but my readers should grasp the point. Rather, Obama reneged on a promise because Obama said in his very words: “If the government is there to support you . . .” which necessitates a “then.” In programming terms this is an “if then” statement. The promise was: “I will keep this plant open for another hundred years.” This is not the meaning of Obama’s original expressions, though. Nor were the words meant to be understood this way. But no matter. In other words, if he had been in charge, even though Obama could not have known the plant was doomed to close by the “free market” Ryan would have used the power of the federal government to keep the plant open, even if the market for SUVs had soured, which is, of course, not what he intends to mean, but asserts nonetheless. When it was closed, when one knows it was closing, or why it closed isn’t treated in Ryan’s speech. The implication is that Obama is not as committed as he claims to be: he can’t be trusted. He did not “support” the plant as he promised. The basis for the accusation is non-historical.

The second part of the speech snip is important to study.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

“It didn’t last another year.” “It is locked up and empty to this day.” ” . . . the recovery as promised is nowhere in sight.” Read those sentences over and over again, please. Here we have Ryan making the typical apples, oranges, and conflation errors that in cynicism speech are mean to beat a drum rather than demonstrate a relationship or support an actual assertion. The answers to the quiz are: yes, yes, and “what promise?” The image: all over the country, plants are “locked up and empty” because Obama did not bring on the “recovery as he promised” will stick, whereas the obvious silliness of “all over the country plants that were supposed to stay open another one hundred years were betrayed by Obama,” which is what Ryan actually says, is couched in thick clouds written by word smiths probably paid to craft language not obviously falsifiable. This, to me, is obviously unethical and “immoral.”

That’s the real problem with the Ryan speech. Cole is right and Cohn is right. But their knives aren’t sharp enough. Even Republicans should be unnerved by this level of breech of trust.

Miniver Cheevy, Nostalgia, Scorn for #moocmooc

A response to Joshua Eyler’s question letter B:

“B. What does this poem have to say about the many different facets of nostalgia?”

It’s significant that Miniver Cheevy is called by the speaker in this poem a “child of scorn” (1). The first stanza provides a possible reason in that Cheevy “assailed the seasons,” seasons here coming with all kinds of possible interpretations: years, weather, habits, the general hard necessities that whittle at the body and the mind (including drink). Is there a relationship between the tendency to be nostalgic and the idea of scorn? In Robinson’s poem, scorn is self-directed. Is Cheevy disdainful of himself, thus wishing he’d been born a “Medici”?

Big Ideas, Bold Ideas, or just Ideas

In politics it’s a possible thing to adjust the definitions of words to convince other people, to hide actions, or to create desired or undesired images. We’ve heard over the last few years, for example, characterizations for some ideas as big and bold when better usage would be the less flavorful but more precise term: “ideas.”

Ideas are, as they say, while adjectives serve to create images or portraits of them. Hoover Dam was a part of a “big idea,” when in reality, the work was big, perhaps even bigger than the dam, and the plan to manage flooding, irrigation, power and so forth was large scale.

I don’t disagree with the word bold to characterize an idea, but appropriateness does matter. We know what’s intended. Perhaps many novels and poems are composed with big ideas in mind. I reach for them myself. To transform the way America makes power wholly from renewables is a big project but it’s not a big or bold idea. One hundred years ago it would have been a crazy idea or fantastic, like Cyrano de Bergerac’s writings about the moon.

If a scientist claimed that the universe was made out of jello, some would say this was a bold notion. If it was shown that, indeed, the universe was made of jello, then we could accurately claim that this was the truth as opposed to being false.

I’d rather go with good idea/bad idea.

On the Ryan Choice

I just think it’s odd. Ryan’s ideas have been out there a long time and serious critics have had a chance to weigh in. Once the disclosure luster fades, we have to meat to debate. Now’s as good time as any other. I’m ready. I don’t think there’s a critical mass readership of Rand to warrant that direction, however. How many people have read Billy Budd?

Ryan Budget Stuff.

Center on Policy and BP stuff.

On Film, Flying and Cynicism

Just a few weeks ago, my wife, son, and daughter went to what my father would always refer to as “the show.” I still remember seeing Godzilla at the drive in. Sometimes in the theater dark I imagine what would happen if . . .

It was only recently that my daughter took my son to see the big opening for the last Harry Potter film in Ithaca, NY, while my wife and I remained behind, reasonably confident that everything would go fine, and it did.

People love going to “the show.” They pay for the pop corn, the drinks, and ease their way into a chair. Some people, like me, want to sit through the opening anticipatories and then also the ending credits, waiting for clues to the future and the often art outside the principle narrative.

I can’t imagine the horror and sorrow of friends and family who had all that dashed in Aurora. My heart sinks and sends condolences.

It only takes one person to ruin it all. Invading armies are not required. Neither is a dictator. This doesn’t mean that we should put up with a culture that makes such acts easier than harder. It’s cynicism to simply persist on the present course. As Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “…for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

Perhaps, soon, going to the movies will be like flying.

Why New Media IPOs Bug Me

When Facebook went through its IPO, I couldn’t quite pin down what bothered me about it. I’m a semi-Facebook user. I dabble in Google+. I use and enjoy small company software for my professional work, like Tinderbox. I pay for as many things as I’m able on my professor’s salary. In my quiet time, I think Facebook should charge a subscription for various levels of use, like a buck a month, so that people have a stake in the features they like or depend on. I ask my students if they would pay and they say they wouldn’t. But then I compare the $1 a month cost to their cell phone charges. Most are on their parents plan, so they don’t even know how much they pay for services like cable. When I tell them, they typically shrug and half-heartedly change their minds or reconsider to the extend that they’re willing to forecast their future behaviors around things they don’t have a lot of control.

If we think about investment as a long term commitment, the IPO takes on a different cast. What did people buy long term for Facebook? What did the big money purchase? Will Facebook exist in ten years? Or will it go into hardware, sell a Facebook phone? Is this any different than, say, the next new thing in refrigerators or automobiles?

I have no idea. But I do worry about the long haul.

It would seem to me that Twitter also has this problem. A lot of people depend on the service and have an investment in its core features. Note how the tweet, however, is not really a tweet anymore but a load of interpretables. The core metaphor is changing. And RSS would seem to be wobbling. Don’t people have more control over or with RSS? Perhaps I’m wrong about that.

Simple things tend toward complexity. For me the nostalgia window is getting shorter.

On Trust, Honesty, and Authority: A Review of Twilight of the Elites

In TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men, Eliot ends with reference to famous whimpers: those of Fawkes and Marlow. The poem is something other than its apparent whole in the context of other works.

Like reading a soda bottle for its calculus and its physicality, its material ecology.

Or like reading bond deals in this article titled The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia by Matt Taibbi, which tells the story of United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg, and Grimm. Taibbi describes the shenanigans in similar terms as Christopher Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites. An example: Taibbi first:

This incredible [fair price] defense, which the attorneys for all three defendants led with, perfectly expresses the awesome arrogance of the modern-day aristocrats who run our financial services sector. Corrupt or not, they built this financial infrastructure, and it’s producing the prices they genuinely think are fair for us – and for them. And fair to them is the customer getting the absolute bare minimum, while they get instant millions for work they didn’t do. Moreover – and this is the most important part – they believe they should get permanent protection from the ravages of the market, i.e., from one another’s competition. Imagine Jack Nicholson on the witness stand, dressed in a repairman’s uniform and tool belt. Who’s gonna fix those refrigerators? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? You can’t handle the truth!

Now Hayes:

We now see ourselves ruled by a remote class. They may not wear flowing robes, or carry miters, but they are marked in their own way as separate and distinct. The distance between those who will be bailed out and those who will not is the ultimate social distance, and it has grown so vast it now strains the bonds of representation that hold the republic and its people together. (215)

Taibbi’s piece explores, by telling the story of the Carollo case, the extent of this “corruption.”

Hayes’ book is about corruption and an idea he terms the “crisis of authority.” It’s not about the casual remark I often hear (and speak myself): “politicians, oh, they’re all crooks.” My father would frequently bristle with this sort of language at the mention of Nixon. Both Hayes and Lessig explore the nuance. Taibbi’s is a more concentrated version.

But to get at this nuance requires inspection of the notion of authority and its complex of relations and opposites, some of which I’ll go into from a literary and geological perspective.

Consider Beowulf and his “war” with Grendel as a tale. Beowulf partly derives his authority from his observable prowess of arms and intelligence. They hear him undue Unferth and they see him fight. In Yi Fu Tuan’s terms, recalling his tremendous Space and Place, the parent is a “place” to a child, a source of comfort, trust, and orientation. Beowulf acts as this sort of orienting agent, and when he eventually dies by dragon, the community will tend towards disorientation. So the metaphor goes. And so, knowing Beowulf’s authority mediated by reputation, Hrothgar hires him.

Beowulf is “trusted” by being “entrusted” with the task of protection. Connectedness is associated to trust in a geographic sense oriented on the “physical” body. Hrothgar breaks a piece of himself or his ability and gives it to Beowulf: he is given the authority to act in Hrothgar’s place. And he knows what he’s giving up in that bargain. A wedding band works in similar geographic terms. I wear a “piece” of my partner on my finger. Hence connectedness and yet another link: honesty, which, etymologically speaking is a characteristic a body earns from others. It would be hard to judge someone honest without some form of relationship. Trust as Trustee, one who may act in another’s place.

Our modern relationship with ULAs is instructive, which is a form of non-agreement agreement. When a user clicks Accept to upgrade their version of the Flash Player, I doubt that that user reads the agreement. Users may not really know what they’re agreeing to, which is a form of blind trust or faith. The consequence of clicking Do Not Accept will result in an expensive paper weight. In other words, this is a form of piecing oneself out without knowing where your pieces are going, a form of disorientation or space blindness.

Lawrence Lessig, Christopher Hayes, and Matt Taibbi cut into this form of disorientation through their examinations of modern corruption. People don’t trust institutions and for good reason. But we should. That’s the significant issue. When municipalities go through the bonding process, they shouldn’t have to worry about banks gaming the system. Taibbi writes

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime. The notorious Abacus deal involving Goldman Sachs, for instance, involved a hedge-fund billionaire ripping off a couple of European banks – who cares? But the bid-rigging scandal laid bare in USA v. Carollo is a totally different animal. This is the world’s biggest banks stealing money that would otherwise have gone toward textbooks and medicine and housing for ordinary Americans, and turning the cash into sports cars and bonuses for the already rich. It’s the equivalent of robbing a charity or a church fund to pay for lap dances.

Who ultimately loses in these deals? Well, to take just one example, the New Jersey Health Care Facilities Finance Authority, the agency that issues bonds for the state’s hospitals, had their interest rates rigged by the Carollo defendants on $17 million in bonds. Since then, more than a dozen New Jersey hospitals have closed, mostly in poor neighborhoods.

Much of these stories, as Hayes details, have to do with the modern concept of space and place and how perceptions have changed between people in relation to those concepts, as Tuan develops them: place as connection and space as disconnection. Congress, our representatives, our goods makers, our banks, our varieties of media have become removed, not geographically in the sense of being somewhere (we know some building somewhere houses the servers) but removed from experiences that effectuate the building of relationships that return human regard and positive meaning not simply reinforcements of self. Partly, this is the story of polls that show extreme negatives and distrust for modern institutions. For Lessig, the reasons for this distrust are less important than the mere fact that the distrust is real.

Hayes in his last chapter runs through not just the negative attitudes but also data about egalitarian views, citing a study by Norton and Ariely. Hayes concludes, “We are more egalitarian than we, ourselves, realize” (228). This is significant in relation to polls weighing positive negative view on institutions. In a sense, this is a “search for” fairness or an alert to the synthesis between trust, authentic experience, fairness, reciprocity and cooperation. See Cremer and Tyler (pdf) for one aspect of this kind of study.

It’s pretty intuitive that people would trust what is near (place) and distrust what is distant (space). When what has been near and is soon found to be distant or unfathomable (see Taibbi on the Carollo case), the sense of self-trust is damaged. That which was once perceived an invulnerable (Penn State) shown to be vulnerable or outright criminal also points back to our own sense of confidence. As Hayes puts it: “They [Tea Party and Netroots] share a sense that they are no longer in control, that some small, corrupt core of elites can launch an idiotic war, or bail out the banks, or mandate health insurance, and despite their relative privilege and education and money and social capital, there’s not a damn thing they can do about” (232).

Thus, when Grendel attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11 and brought them down, we sought out Beowulf. But those Beowulfs entrusted to us have proven themselves inadequate to the task, as cheats, fakes, and Unferths. This analogy is overly simplistic: we live in a big country not in a Geat village. Nor is it all that profitable to write what might seem a glorification of a poem pointing to anything resembling real-world experience; that would be like holding to the images of football coaches in their honorific poses, chiseled into bronze. Beowulf is an ideal, but its metaphors can be telling and significant. In a world of polymaths, all the polymaths would starve, as Plato argued in The Republic. We need to count on and rely on each other and share our talents in our complex ecologies.

Hayes argues in his solution for reconnection. I interpret this as a rebuilding of a sense of place. When one walks into a local bank, he or she shouldn’t distrust the banker. The banker doesn’t need to scam the citizen. People will argue that to write “reconnection” amounts to naiveté. I argue it doesn’t. One might want to scam or cheat a neighbor, but this is not a requirement. The municipalities in Carollo case could have received fair deals from the brokers; Barkley’s could have simply represented their LIBOR numbers on the level; the executives at Country Wide could have done business that exacted fair returns; Paterno could have sought justice; bin Laden could have sought other means to his ends; et cetera et cetera, minus mental illness, delusion or whatever other phenomenon get in the way of sensible means to ends. But none of this is what happened, of course, and the pathologies of position are powerful forces.

Reconsidering our language with one another is another step, in addition to the solution proposed by Hayes in terms of coalition building, because this “rebuilding of trust” requires careful reflection on how to talk, write, and otherwise exchange ideas. Unfortunately, at the moment, our political, contract, and other forms of language are almost incoherent and in may ways walled off by ideology and what amounts to king-of-the-hill defensiveness and zero sum world views. In a way, we are ourselves looking for the Higgs boson. It’s somewhere in all that “space out there.”

It’s a good question

Shawn Fremstad asks

Why is OK to pay the mostly female workers who take care of other people’s children and of seniors and people with disabilities so little? (Average wages for workers in care occupations are less than half of average wages for workers overall: for child care workers, average annual wages are $21,320 compared with $45,230 for workers overall. And, it’s not just about education—nearly half of all child care workers have either some college or a college degree).

Would it have something to do with the price points of that care in relation to the cost of raising children in general? I remember paying for child care back in the nineties when both my wife and I both worked. And it was a lot of money, but, not nearly enough to raise the wages of care workers. But I really have no idea.

But I’m interested in simple questions: should things cost what they do, as in a $300 gallon of saltwater (typically used by people with allergies and sold in teeny spray bottles) or the price point of a course at Harvard.