Many USers are worried about the Obama government's plan to try five of the detainees from the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Good Americans, they are worried that the five captives may not be convicted in our courts. Many Americans are afraid of justice, afraid of the rule of law.
It is possible that justice might prevail in the trial of those five men. The evidence against them was likely gained by illegal surveillance, or by torturing them. It won't be admissable in court.
Rather than face that possibility, many USers want to keep those men in prison for the rest of their lives. Many Americans want to "disappear" them. Are there any USers left who remember when Americans responded with horror at the "disappearances" of people in other countries?
Of course, the United States has "disappeared" people for years, thanks to the thugs at CIA and NSA. And for the last nine years we have held hundreds of "disappeared" people at Guantanamo--and still hold them there, a full year after we elected a president who promised to close down that illegal torture camp.
Presumably, the Obama government thinks it has something of a case against these five men. But the other 300? The government must not have a case against any of them; the only thing they may have done wrong was get captured.
"Abandon hope all you who enter here." That's what the sign says as you enter Dante's Hell--or Guantanamo. And if many USers had their way, the motto of the American courts would be what the Artful Dodger thinks ofthe English courts in Dickens's Oliver Twist: "This ain't the shop for justice."
Our patriotic friends and neighbors say, "We can't trust our courts to lynch people."
Americans aren't a people who respect law, or want justice. We aren't even a "we," really. And not believing in justice or society, we aren't a "people."
zondag 15 november 2009
maandag 2 november 2009
Teaching Greed
American universities teach greed.
Never mind that they sometimes teach more "academic" subjects like maths and physics and philosophy, history, chemistry, and literature. Mainly they teach greed.
They teach greed by example. There are now 28 American college presidents who take salaries of $1,000,000 a year, or more. And there are hundreds more who take salaries of $500,000 a year, or more. There are also dozens of football and basketball coaches who take salaries of $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. And how many thousands of vice-presidents and vice-provosts who take salaries of $400,000 or more!
Our students aren't stupid. But they are intellectually and morally vulnerable. And no matter what they learn in their classes about society--and the sciences and social sciences as well as the humanities departments teach about society and social values--our students see the example of their universities' "leaders." And their example is hard to resist, and hard to misinterpret. GREED is what it says. GREED.
Universities in America don't teach their students how to make money, except in "business courses" and "business schools." But American universities teach their students--all their students--to want to make money. That's the goal. That's what students are learning.
How shameful. What an obscenity. What a disservice to humanity. What a destructive undertaking.
Bert Hornback
Never mind that they sometimes teach more "academic" subjects like maths and physics and philosophy, history, chemistry, and literature. Mainly they teach greed.
They teach greed by example. There are now 28 American college presidents who take salaries of $1,000,000 a year, or more. And there are hundreds more who take salaries of $500,000 a year, or more. There are also dozens of football and basketball coaches who take salaries of $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. And how many thousands of vice-presidents and vice-provosts who take salaries of $400,000 or more!
Our students aren't stupid. But they are intellectually and morally vulnerable. And no matter what they learn in their classes about society--and the sciences and social sciences as well as the humanities departments teach about society and social values--our students see the example of their universities' "leaders." And their example is hard to resist, and hard to misinterpret. GREED is what it says. GREED.
Universities in America don't teach their students how to make money, except in "business courses" and "business schools." But American universities teach their students--all their students--to want to make money. That's the goal. That's what students are learning.
How shameful. What an obscenity. What a disservice to humanity. What a destructive undertaking.
Bert Hornback
vrijdag 23 oktober 2009
FUNDING FIGHTING DOESN'T FEED PEOPLE
Funding fighting doesn't feed people, but peace does. In the United Gun-toting States of Bombs Bursting in Air America, however, we fund fighting: for the year 2010, at the rate of $2,000,000,000.00 a day. That's two billion dollars a day. And that's just for the Department of Defense. (It used to be called the "War Department"--which at least was honest. Given that our two current wars are--as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Greneda all were--wars of aggression, not national defense, the present name is an obscene lie.)
Part of the Pentagon's $600,000,000,000.00 budget--$160,000,000,000.00 total or almost $500,000,000.00 a day--will be spent on our two outrageous, illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And nobody will object. We are so committed to violence that to secure passage of a bill to protect homosexuals from hate crimes, the measure had to be attached to a fat military spending bill. (Knowing that the Defense spending bill would pass, twenty-seven Republican senators voted against it just to demonstrate their approval of violence against homosexuals.)
If we spend $2,000,000,000.00 a day rebuilding the Iraq we have destroyed and feeding and housing and educating Afghans, we might actually win peace in both countries. But all that our $2,000,000,000.00 a day for contunued war will win for us is further destruction, more violent deaths, more hatred, more shame.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Baron Acton said that a hundred plus years ago. And here we stand, budget in place, blood on our hands, and bombs away: absolutely guilty.
Part of the Pentagon's $600,000,000,000.00 budget--$160,000,000,000.00 total or almost $500,000,000.00 a day--will be spent on our two outrageous, illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And nobody will object. We are so committed to violence that to secure passage of a bill to protect homosexuals from hate crimes, the measure had to be attached to a fat military spending bill. (Knowing that the Defense spending bill would pass, twenty-seven Republican senators voted against it just to demonstrate their approval of violence against homosexuals.)
If we spend $2,000,000,000.00 a day rebuilding the Iraq we have destroyed and feeding and housing and educating Afghans, we might actually win peace in both countries. But all that our $2,000,000,000.00 a day for contunued war will win for us is further destruction, more violent deaths, more hatred, more shame.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Baron Acton said that a hundred plus years ago. And here we stand, budget in place, blood on our hands, and bombs away: absolutely guilty.
zondag 18 oktober 2009
DESTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION
I want to talk about a silly word, which is used to do something that is not good. GOOD is a social word: it and "gather" come from the same root, and mean the same thing. "Together" is an intensified version of "gather." And something that holds together--or holds us together--is GOOD.
One of the things that hold us together is language. Communicationis another social word, and language, as verbal communication, is socially important. Communion is a word that probably comes not from com+unis ("one together") but from com+munis. Munis is a curious word that means both "gift" and "duty"--and it gives us words like "common," "communion," and "community." All of those words have to do with or gifts to each other or our duty to each other.
Good things hold us together.
In our language a structure is something built. If I destroy it, I destruct it: un-build it. Construction is something built complexly, out of parts, put together, to make a new structure.
When we read we put things together, to understand them. We read words in sentences, we read maps, some of us read tea-leaves or the lines in palms. Sentences, maps, tea-leaves, the lines in palms are all, in a sense, constructions. A single line on a sheet of paper is not a map, nor is a single line in the palm of a hand. Nor is a single word.
Suppose I say--aloud--the word there. Did I say "there," or "their," or "they're"? You don't know. So I add another word, merry. Did I say "merry," or "Mary"? I add and Tom. That doesn't help, except that I can forget about "merry." If I add, then, who, you have to wait again: I might be saying "There Mary and Tom, who are young, eat. . . ." Or I might be saying "Their Mary and Tom, who are young, are older than my Mary and Tom." Or maybe I'm saying "They're Mary and Tom, who are young."
The words work together, constructing sense. And the structure of the sentence lets me understand what the words mean, together.
But if I destroy that structure, I can't make sense of those words. Destroy is the act of destruction: which is not a good thing.
We have another word, deconstruction, used these days by people who don't care to read, who don't value communication, who aren't intertested in community or goodness.
A deconstructionist looks at a sentence--let's have a new one: "When I offered the small boy a cookie, he held out his hand, like a Catholic taking communion from a priest, then--trusting me--popped it in his mouth without even thinking that it might be poison." That's clear enough, isn't it?
But the deconstructionist ingnores what the sentence says, and instead focusus on and "priest" and "poison." Ha! he says. "Priests poison young people with what they pretend are gifts." And before you know it, we will be talking about religious prejudice and pedophilia and parental responsibility and safe streets.
Deconstructionism is an egotistical practice. It lets the deconstructionist ignore what someone has said, in order to talk about what the deconstructionist wants to talk about. It uses and abuses what other people say. It is a formalization of the attitude that lets some people say, "What I hear you saying is. . . ."
Deconstructionists pretend to be interested in language. But they aren't any more interested in language than they are in the act of communication--the gift and duty of communication. If they were interested in language, they wouldn't use a word like deconstruction. They would use the word destruction instead.
One of the things that hold us together is language. Communicationis another social word, and language, as verbal communication, is socially important. Communion is a word that probably comes not from com+unis ("one together") but from com+munis. Munis is a curious word that means both "gift" and "duty"--and it gives us words like "common," "communion," and "community." All of those words have to do with or gifts to each other or our duty to each other.
Good things hold us together.
In our language a structure is something built. If I destroy it, I destruct it: un-build it. Construction is something built complexly, out of parts, put together, to make a new structure.
When we read we put things together, to understand them. We read words in sentences, we read maps, some of us read tea-leaves or the lines in palms. Sentences, maps, tea-leaves, the lines in palms are all, in a sense, constructions. A single line on a sheet of paper is not a map, nor is a single line in the palm of a hand. Nor is a single word.
Suppose I say--aloud--the word there. Did I say "there," or "their," or "they're"? You don't know. So I add another word, merry. Did I say "merry," or "Mary"? I add and Tom. That doesn't help, except that I can forget about "merry." If I add, then, who, you have to wait again: I might be saying "There Mary and Tom, who are young, eat. . . ." Or I might be saying "Their Mary and Tom, who are young, are older than my Mary and Tom." Or maybe I'm saying "They're Mary and Tom, who are young."
The words work together, constructing sense. And the structure of the sentence lets me understand what the words mean, together.
But if I destroy that structure, I can't make sense of those words. Destroy is the act of destruction: which is not a good thing.
We have another word, deconstruction, used these days by people who don't care to read, who don't value communication, who aren't intertested in community or goodness.
A deconstructionist looks at a sentence--let's have a new one: "When I offered the small boy a cookie, he held out his hand, like a Catholic taking communion from a priest, then--trusting me--popped it in his mouth without even thinking that it might be poison." That's clear enough, isn't it?
But the deconstructionist ingnores what the sentence says, and instead focusus on and "priest" and "poison." Ha! he says. "Priests poison young people with what they pretend are gifts." And before you know it, we will be talking about religious prejudice and pedophilia and parental responsibility and safe streets.
Deconstructionism is an egotistical practice. It lets the deconstructionist ignore what someone has said, in order to talk about what the deconstructionist wants to talk about. It uses and abuses what other people say. It is a formalization of the attitude that lets some people say, "What I hear you saying is. . . ."
Deconstructionists pretend to be interested in language. But they aren't any more interested in language than they are in the act of communication--the gift and duty of communication. If they were interested in language, they wouldn't use a word like deconstruction. They would use the word destruction instead.
vrijdag 16 oktober 2009
Remembering FDR
I am old enough to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president of this country. I lived in a small Kentucky town just south of Mammoth Cave, which was cleared by Roosevelt's C.C.C. workers. The area benefited from the Rural Electrification program, too. He brought the country back from the Great Depression, and brought millions of Americans back from unemployment and poverty and bankruptcy to work and stability.
I also remember that Roosevelt was hated by large numbers of Americans, Republican and Democrat alike. My aunt worked in Washington, starting in 1939. She regularly sent home carbon copies of hate material distributed quite openly in the Commerce Department, where she worked. They were type-written, and the biggest letters were no more than twelve-pouint caps--LIKE THESE. But they were big enough that you could see the venom, and hear the hate.
You could hear it on the radio, too. And read it in the newspapers. And your neighbors talked it. What was said on the radio and in the press wasn't so bad as the not-so-very-underground smears that my aunt sent us from Washington, but they were often hateful, too. The neighborhood hate was almost mild, because even if you were (or had been) rich, Roosevelt was saving your tail. But you knew it was wrong, because of the way he was doing it--and because he was doing it. And what he was doing was Socialist and therefore bad. He was making everybody work together, and even if he and his Socialism saved us, we knew that he and his Socialism were wrong.
The vicious stuff called Roosevelt a "Jew," or sometimes just a "Jew-lover." The hate-mongers called him "Roosenvelt," as though that made him as Jew. They called him a traitor because he insisted that Black Americans were not only human, but just as human as White Americans. They hated his wife, Eleanor, too: she was a loud-mouthed, ugly woman, and like her husband, a Socialist. And of course she was a "Jew-lover" too. No telling what Americans would have thought or done if they had known that somewhere in Eleanor Roosevelt's background there are most probably Black ancestors.
Americans hated the Roosevelts because they were intelligent, because they spoke in sentences, because he had a "snooty" accent. Americans hated the Roosevelts because they told us what to do. They didn't insult our intelligence; they simply noted it, silently, and tried--for our sake and the country's--to overcome our ignorance and stupidity.
Because Roosevelt and his policies got us out of the Great Depression, we could only hate him; we couldn't vote against him. Our selfishness told us that. We had to put up with him, and re-elect him. We were like stupid, incompetent boy scouts, lost in a woods, and having to trust a compass--which in our ignorance we couldn't possibly trust--to find our way out.
President Obama's situation is a lot like that of President Roosevelt. And the best we can hope is that he can survive all the stupid attacks, and save us in spite of ourselves.
I also remember that Roosevelt was hated by large numbers of Americans, Republican and Democrat alike. My aunt worked in Washington, starting in 1939. She regularly sent home carbon copies of hate material distributed quite openly in the Commerce Department, where she worked. They were type-written, and the biggest letters were no more than twelve-pouint caps--LIKE THESE. But they were big enough that you could see the venom, and hear the hate.
You could hear it on the radio, too. And read it in the newspapers. And your neighbors talked it. What was said on the radio and in the press wasn't so bad as the not-so-very-underground smears that my aunt sent us from Washington, but they were often hateful, too. The neighborhood hate was almost mild, because even if you were (or had been) rich, Roosevelt was saving your tail. But you knew it was wrong, because of the way he was doing it--and because he was doing it. And what he was doing was Socialist and therefore bad. He was making everybody work together, and even if he and his Socialism saved us, we knew that he and his Socialism were wrong.
The vicious stuff called Roosevelt a "Jew," or sometimes just a "Jew-lover." The hate-mongers called him "Roosenvelt," as though that made him as Jew. They called him a traitor because he insisted that Black Americans were not only human, but just as human as White Americans. They hated his wife, Eleanor, too: she was a loud-mouthed, ugly woman, and like her husband, a Socialist. And of course she was a "Jew-lover" too. No telling what Americans would have thought or done if they had known that somewhere in Eleanor Roosevelt's background there are most probably Black ancestors.
Americans hated the Roosevelts because they were intelligent, because they spoke in sentences, because he had a "snooty" accent. Americans hated the Roosevelts because they told us what to do. They didn't insult our intelligence; they simply noted it, silently, and tried--for our sake and the country's--to overcome our ignorance and stupidity.
Because Roosevelt and his policies got us out of the Great Depression, we could only hate him; we couldn't vote against him. Our selfishness told us that. We had to put up with him, and re-elect him. We were like stupid, incompetent boy scouts, lost in a woods, and having to trust a compass--which in our ignorance we couldn't possibly trust--to find our way out.
President Obama's situation is a lot like that of President Roosevelt. And the best we can hope is that he can survive all the stupid attacks, and save us in spite of ourselves.
donderdag 15 oktober 2009
NOBEL OBAMA
President Obama's Nobel Prize for Peace has Americans furious. Why? Let's start with the most obvious one: he's a black American. And America's vocal chords are not much different today from what they were forty-five years ago, when Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize.
I was a new faculty member at the University of Michigan then. I walked into my freshman English class and began by noting Dr. King's being so honored. One of my students--never mind his name, but I still have his name, his face, and his home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in my head--said, loudly and with conviction, "Give a prize to that n*****? They ought to shoot him."
But it's more than that. Obama stands for change. And in doing so he stands for a different America from the one George Bush appealed to.
Why weren't there constant protests against Bush? Why did the media avoid mentioning what protests there were? Because even among those who voted for John Kerry, there were plenty of Americans who supported Bush: even as he lied to us, even as lies were exposed that cost several thousand young Americans their lives. He was a warrior, a My-Country-Right-Or-Wrong American who thought war was the American Way of Life. He was a rich man who thought being rich was a Constitutional Right for his kind of Americans. And he was stupid. All three of those things appeal to Americans, never mind the political party.
President Obama has a tough road ahead of him. But he is a strong man, and he believes in what he is doing. He has to end the wars he inherited; there is nothing right about either of them, and never was. He has to close Guantanamo and the other illegal concentration camps the United States runs hidden away in other countries. He has to forbid torture absolutely--unless he wants to let somebody torture Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. And he has to get health care for ordinary Americans.
That's a lot. And a Nobel Peace Prize should help toward those goals. It would, certainly, in any country on earth except the United States.
Bert Hornback
I was a new faculty member at the University of Michigan then. I walked into my freshman English class and began by noting Dr. King's being so honored. One of my students--never mind his name, but I still have his name, his face, and his home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in my head--said, loudly and with conviction, "Give a prize to that n*****? They ought to shoot him."
But it's more than that. Obama stands for change. And in doing so he stands for a different America from the one George Bush appealed to.
Why weren't there constant protests against Bush? Why did the media avoid mentioning what protests there were? Because even among those who voted for John Kerry, there were plenty of Americans who supported Bush: even as he lied to us, even as lies were exposed that cost several thousand young Americans their lives. He was a warrior, a My-Country-Right-Or-Wrong American who thought war was the American Way of Life. He was a rich man who thought being rich was a Constitutional Right for his kind of Americans. And he was stupid. All three of those things appeal to Americans, never mind the political party.
President Obama has a tough road ahead of him. But he is a strong man, and he believes in what he is doing. He has to end the wars he inherited; there is nothing right about either of them, and never was. He has to close Guantanamo and the other illegal concentration camps the United States runs hidden away in other countries. He has to forbid torture absolutely--unless he wants to let somebody torture Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. And he has to get health care for ordinary Americans.
That's a lot. And a Nobel Peace Prize should help toward those goals. It would, certainly, in any country on earth except the United States.
Bert Hornback
zondag 4 oktober 2009
Feed the Poor
Europeans don't do stupid things so very often, but the great milk spill last week was stupid. And shameful. And mean.
I sympathise with the farmers who are being squeezed out of existence by corporate "farmers." But the proper protest is NOT to dump milk.
The milk--thousands and thousands of liters or gallons or tons or tonnes of it--were dumped. Why couldn't all that milk have been sent to starving children in Africa? Why couldn't countries that have big airplanes have flown milk to Africa?
That would have been a much more effective and efficacious protest.
We need to try thinking every now and then. Even an occasional thought would make this a better world.
Bert Hornback
I sympathise with the farmers who are being squeezed out of existence by corporate "farmers." But the proper protest is NOT to dump milk.
The milk--thousands and thousands of liters or gallons or tons or tonnes of it--were dumped. Why couldn't all that milk have been sent to starving children in Africa? Why couldn't countries that have big airplanes have flown milk to Africa?
That would have been a much more effective and efficacious protest.
We need to try thinking every now and then. Even an occasional thought would make this a better world.
Bert Hornback
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