Category Archives: Political Commentary

America the Entertained

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We Americans are undergoing a cultural transformation. I know in many respects that is hardly news. What I’ve been observing though is a confluence of streams of those changes in ways that suggest they are picking up speed, not unlike several rain-swollen rivers coming together to create a massive flood as it works its way down-stream.

It’s difficult to characterize all the subtleties of this growing torrent, but for purposes of this post I’m going to focus on three of these streams in the context of our national demand for endless entertainment. I’ll leave the non-entertaining analysis to the sociologists.

Let’s start with politics, specifically the debates by the Republican presidential candidates.  It seems to me the behavior we have observed not only by the candidates, but the very format and “rules” for these televised events is no longer a forum in any classical sense for a debate, that is, a discussion of genuine public policy positions the candidates hold on the important issues facing the nation. Instead, they have been converted into political theater, orchestrated bash and trash sessions analogous to two teams scrambling for a fumbled football, the referee-pundits at the opposite end of the field, commenting on what they think they observe eighty yards away.

The result takes little effort to parse. Read more…

Hey, Mister, Can You Spare a Job?

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A Post in the “A Modern School” Series

The unemployment situation in the United States is dismal.  Take a look at this graphic published in the New York Times September 17, 2011:

Poverty and Unemployment in the United States. Graphic Courtesy The New York Times

To my way of thinking it is incomprehensible that the human suffering caused by this economic nightmare would be considered acceptable by a single individual in Congress, but that indeed appears to be the case.  My motivation for writing this post is, however, not to slam either party for the abdication of their constitutionally sworn sacred trust to govern (although I admit I just did that very thing).

Instead, I want to look at an emerging storm that is the consequence of the situation.  As each month passes, for those who are out of work there is an assumed degradation of their skills, their ability to be “shovel ready” the moment they get that call to show up on Monday for work at their new job.

The impact of this Great Recession, as some call it, is multifaceted. Yes, the facet we hear most about  is the economic impact.  Another facet, however, continues to grow and become increasingly important: how do we reeducate the fourteen million out-of-work individuals whose job skills are either rusty or their job has disappeared altogether?

I suggested in my previous post, “A Modern School” that not only are American schools not prepared for the emerging age of Virtuality in terms of the way we construct our buildings, we are equally unprepared in the way we educate our teachers.

Add to this growing storm fourteen million adults whose job skills are degrading at an incredible rate as they sit idle, who will not just need retooling for the last place they worked, but will need comprehensive educational transformation, something we are not prepared to provide in any meaningful way, and we are in a huge amount of trouble.

Some will say, well, that’s what the community colleges are for.  The answer to that is yes and no.  Community colleges are an invaluable resource for a wide spectrum of jobs, but their ability to meet this demand is limited.  By their very nature they are institutions that are tied to their local constituents and serve often very specific missions within the community where they are located.

It is also reasonable to assume that the network of community colleges cannot absorb even half of the currently long-term unemployed.  Like the public schools, they do not have the resources, faculty, or staff, to admit numbers of that magnitude, let alone be radically restructured, themselves, for teaching these adults how to successfully work in the age of Virtuality.  Even if it were possible to for half the unemployed, 7 million!, to get the financing to enter community colleges, the schools simply could not accept anything close to that number.

America’s education crisis, let’s just be honest and call it what it is, is made far worse by this unemployment disaster, amounting to another sucker punch to the recovery.  I have little confidence that the current political atmosphere has any capacity whatsoever to either comprehend or take the action needed to reverse this rush toward the waterfall of educational disaster.

The great tragedy is that we have in every state the university and college education scholars fully capable of not only figuring out what we need to do, and along with the other professionals working in the schools themselves, equally prepared and willing to do it.  Will they be given the green light?  I’ll keep posting on this topic but I’m not holding my breath.

West Coast Universe

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The pursuit of life, liberty, and liberality…

Hello there from the West Coast Universe.*  This summer I’ve been blogging using the occasional series I’ve called “Hospital Food for the Mind,” which was based on the simple idea that I was writing short pieces during lunch from the dining room of the hospital where I work**.

It has long been recognized by all sorts of -ologists that regionalisms run deep in the cultural genetic structure of the country.  In the years since the National Media began using the Red State/Blue State concept for their political and election broadcasts, the visual impact of those disparities have been accentuated.  Added to that, the recent constant media chatter about “The Beltway” referring to the “alternate reality” of Congress and the Administration inside the Beltway highway ringing Washington, DC, the term kept popping into my mind. The more I thought about it the more I liked it and I decided to try it out in place of Hospital Food (admittedly, which still gets a bad rap even though my hospital has a classically trained chef running the kitchen).

I had to have a more evolved operational definition for WCU (see, it shortens nicely, too). After giving that some consideration I came up with the tag line: The pursuit of life, liberty, and liberality.

Yes, it’s a twist on the phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  I want to convey, however, a new twist, a XTO twist, so to speak, with a not so subtle reference to being liberal.  In many parts of the country, being labeled a Liberal is the equivalent of being labeled a dirty pinko commie (the fact dirty pinko commies no longer exist is largely irrelevant to those who do the labeling.  They know one when they see one).

I chose the term “liberality.” For one thing, it conveys a different sense of what being liberal is.  Those who find it necessary to sneer when they are forced to say the word out-loud will have to really work at extending that to liberality.  And for those who religious beliefs are welded to modern fundamentalist conservatism, they will be faced with the discomforting fact that the very concept of liberality is rooted deeply in biblical theology.

The Hebrew prophets, Jesus Christ, and the Apostles of his Gospel made it clear: liberality toward the care of our neighbors is the highest calling set out by God.  There is not, I assert, even one prohibition in scripture for the role of government—a government of, by, and for the people in particular—to care for those very people and for the taxes of those people to be used to provide that very care (in the sense of loving one’s neighbor as oneself).

To those who think they can challenge my knowledge of the Bible in this regard, let them try.

So, I’m offering my thoughts from here in the West Coast Universe, a place where those who are progressive and liberal in their politics live and thrive.  It is a land of patriots who are proud to be Americans without apology or compromise, unbowed by the radical Right.

We see our Inalienable Rights as the pursuit of life, liberty and liberality.  That’s the essence of the West Coast Universe, at least here at Extreme Thinkover.

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*I can’t take any credit for coining the term “West Coast Universe.”  A Google search came up with just over 260 hits of the phrase used in one form or another from a variety of sources around the world.  I can offer the disclaimer that my use is not affiliated with anyone else’s and is solely for the purpose of commentary on Extreme Thinkover and under fair use not intended as an infringement on any copyright or trademark.

**The SMS policy of my hospital prohibits naming it unless I provide a disclaimer on every single thing I write as being my opinion and not necessarily theirs.  Since I find this policy ludicrous and an infringement on my 1st Amendment Right to free speech, I refuse to list the organization by name in any of my online sites.  It’s their loss, really.  I like the organization otherwise, and would write all sorts of nice things about it.