Nonfiction – Page 26 – education and deconstruction.com

Disrupting Class

The Book of the Week is “Disrupting Class, How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns” by Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, published in 2008.

All three of the authors– educrats– pushed education solutions that were mostly software-centric and charter-school based. The educrats made no distinctions between teaching and learning, but indicated that students would learn from software, if schools adopted their recommendations. It is difficult to see how students who are unwilling to learn, would learn from software, though, without supervision.

Nevertheless, one point the authors got right, was that a wrench in the works that is hindering their push to convert the American education system into a machine-dominated one– is teachers’ unions across the country. One other uncertain aspect of the whole kit and caboodle is the competition between the two current software operating systems– Windows and Apple. So, due to all this political patronage and profiteering, America’s education system will remain a patchwork, most likely.

Anyway, in 2004, one school district’s (demographically similar) students in Kentucky had 26% better state standardized test scores than another; the latter had three times the funding. There are usually three major reasons for such a discrepancy: the former district prepped the students for the test, and /or they cheated, and / or students possessed the basic skills and fundamental knowledge to do better than the competition.

The authors admitted more research was needed to determine the reasons for the discrepancy. They did however, declare that their recommendations for bettering the American education system through customization of teaching would help all students improve, regardless of funding.

The authors then presented a hypothetical scenario which would defy reality in most underfunded, understaffed and /or poorly staffed schools. In the scenario, a star athlete was attending that kind of a high school. He was having trouble understanding a concept in science class. The teacher wasn’t explaining it in a way the student could understand it. If the student didn’t keep his grades up, he wouldn’t be able to play in the big soccer game. The student’s father, an engineer, was more than happy to, was available to, and was able to, successfully tutor him so he could still play. The student lived happily ever after.

First of all, subpar schools tend to coddle their star athletes– allow them to pass their classes, or provide them with extra tutoring. Secondly, such schools have a significant number of students in overcrowded classrooms, who are discipline problems– disruptive to the class (sort of like the software-based learning that would be disruptive to the industry that the authors seemed to think the American education system is becoming).

The anecdote said nothing about: the classroom’s learning environment (which in subpar schools is frequently noisy and / or hostile) or what proportion of the other students were truly interested in learning, etc. Thirdly, it would be very unlikely that the student’s father would be an engineer, never mind available.

If there was only a handful of students who truly wanted to learn, then the authors should have suggested that those schools assign those students to do software-based learning. Those students deserve better! But the authors didn’t suggest that.

It stands to reason that live, experienced teachers should know their students and thus know how to customize teaching or customize extra help for each one. The inconvenient realities that prevent them from doing so, include but are certainly not limited to:

limited class time;

overcrowded classes;

classes with students who are disruptive the entire period; and

lack of resources for helping students learn the way they learn best.

The authors complained that American schools developed ways to lump kids together efficiently in classrooms, but in ways that have hindered their learning. But– there are reasons other than efficiency: individualized learning is expensive; face to-face social interaction is good for the kids; and they learn from one another. In isolation (with software-based learning), they don’t.

The authors then compared customized teaching to products in corporate America. This was not a very accurate analogy. For, students, teachers and resources aren’t product parts; corporate America runs on the profit motive. Education shouldn’t. Nevertheless, that is the direction it’s heading, with more and more commercialized visual education resources.

The authors explained that two recent American federal education laws would lead to growing pains and chaos in the short term, but [italics, theirs] “schools have actually been improving.” Yes, and so has the United States: a meaningless generalization. One of the laws, No Child Left Behind, a can-of-worms, was obsessed with raising standardized test scores across the board, for all students. It caused schools to (besides go crazy) lie with statistics.

The authors failed to elaborate on the aforementioned “improving” with specific examples. Instead, they went on to briefly describe the evolution of the American education system, mentioning a few influencers in early curricula, trends that prompted changes to those curricula, and changes to student populations due to other federal laws, through the years.

The next anecdote told of a student doing online research. The problem is that, sadly, the World Wide Web has been largely taken over by political propagandists and profiteers.

A subplot of the above anecdote (which was ongoing) was that a dedicated high school student got permission to take an online course in Arabic through the local community college. This, because her school didn’t offer Arabic. In a later chapter, the authors claimed the course was free (!) but didn’t specify whether course materials were free, or what kind of financial arrangement, if any, was made between the high school and college. They also weren’t clear whether the course fulfilled a graduation requirement for the student.

The student was allegedly going to chat with a native Arabic speaker halfway around the world. However, there are all different dialects of Arabic spoken in different Middle Eastern countries. The authors explained nothing about this inconvenient fact in their fanciful anecdote.

Further, the authors wrongheadedly compared the disruptiveness of online classes to that of innovations in consumer goods. But those are apples and oranges. Consumer goods’ innovations are driven by the profit motive. Childrens’ educations are driven by their parents’ belief in education and legal requirements that children attend school. The parents see the connection between education and success in life.

There are millions of complications of all sorts in connection with preparing children to become mature, responsible adults. Consumer-goods innovations are applied to inanimate objects. The only similarity is that costs of software-based learning and innovations will both fall as time goes on. But for students: at what price?? Especially if their chemistry class, as has happened at Brigham Young University (according to the authors)– was turned into a video game??

The authors thought that the large amount of money spent for universal free pre-kindergarten could be more wisely spent on parenting classes. But, once again, they failed to elaborate, and instead, ended the chapter. (For more extensive info on the myriad of subjects covered above, see this blog’s entire category of posts, “Education”).

Read the book to learn: the four major aspects of the American education system that, according to the authors, constrained students from learning; why the authors thought extrinsic motivators would force schools to rethink their services; the four ways the authors contended that technology would assist with customized learning; other comparisons with corporate models; charter school methods; and other imaginary “learning” scenarios that are likely to remain imaginary.

The Death of Money / Dealings – BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “The Death of Money, The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System” by James Rickards, published in 2014. This was an all-over-the-map hodgepodge of generalizations on global financial trends, economic theory and what the author claimed was the devastation those trends could lead to, as of the book’s writing.

Prior to 9/11, the CIA possessed no expertise in the nefarious goings-on in the securities industry that could presage the occurrence of a terrorist attack. America’s law enforcement and security agencies had plenty of data, but inter-agency rivalry inhibited information-sharing and creativity– that would have allowed them to “connect the dots” in getting more specific information.

Prior to 9/11, American intelligence did detect irregular trading patterns in the stocks of the two airlines whose planes were targeted in the attacks. A tiny percentage of those trades were illegal because they were made by insiders– by the terrorists who knew those airlines’ share prices would soon plummet; the remaining percentage of anomalous trading was done by those who noticed the unusual activity (but not the reason for it) and jumped on the bandwagon.

After the attacks, threat-detection software was created for monitoring not just stock trading, but also currency and precious metals trading. The author wrote that a recently trendy means for bringing down an enemy-nation is: doing serious economic and financial harm rather than physical harm. Assaults on a nation’s technology and infrastructure such as the money-handling parts of cyberspace, aviation, dams and utilities, instead of targeting a country’s military and weapons or people of a specific ethnic group, is becoming the new normal.

The author remarked that China’s institutions are actually at risk for attacks, because the country’s government, economically, owns a large chunk of the means of production and arguably, labor; not to mention, capital. Wealthy Chinese business owners and executives have a co-dependent relationship with (corrupt) government officials. Besides, there are: “cross ownership, family ties, front companies, and straw man stockholders.”

The author warned the reader that a global financial crisis is likely in the offing due to prevailing circumstances in the economic heavy hitters of the world (like, the United States and China); among those circumstances: misallocation of investment funds; employers’ power to minimize benefits and compensation; red ink and the ever-widening, (allegedly alarming) gap between rich and poor. Financial panic is correlated with social unrest. That can lead to revolution.

The magnitude and accelerating frequency of financial bailouts of the last twenty-five years just shows how fragile the economic systems of the world are. In the United States, excessive deregulation fueled out-of-control greed, etc., etc., etc. In Europe, the group of nations that agreed to adopt one currency (the euro) thought the other nations would help mitigate their own economic problems, when in reality– they were putting all their eggs in one basket. In effect, they had to get permission from the others to make significant changes to their economic policies; they were forced into unhealthy co-dependent relationships.

Read the book to get the lowdown on: all the different groups of nations which were trying to diminish the U.S. dollar’s hegemony (hint: BRICS, BELL, GIIPS, SCO, GCC) at the book’s writing; the United States’ economic system explained for laypeople (via a Venn diagram, along with how the author defined “money” and “death”– both buried in the middle of the book); and everything you ever wanted to know about the value of gold, among other factors in the American dollar’s declining power in the world.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “Dealings, A Political and Financial Life” by Felix Rohatyn, published in 2010. This bragfest described the life of the typical alpha male who rode a fabulous career in the securities industry, starting in the 1950’s.

The aforementioned first Bonus Book described the trends indicative of a dire future global financial situation. Many such untoward events have already occurred in the last couple of centuries (!), and keep happening. Every time, the seeds of financial disaster are sown decades prior to when it hits the fan.

The selective memory and cherry-picking of data of participants and victims (not to mention propagandists!) cause readers to perceive that those kinds of events are unprecedented, or are becoming more frequent. Excuse the cliche, THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN (For more info, see this blog’s posts: Serpent on the Rock, A Fighting Chance, Since Yesterday, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, The Zeroes and Dot Bomb).

Rohatyn described a few major stressful economic near-disasters that he was asked to help remedy. One situation was early 1970’s Wall Street, which was a house of cards about to collapse. Another was the near-bankruptcy of New York City in the mid-1970’s.

The late 1950’s saw the city becoming a bloated, bureaucratic civil-service gravy train, due to the increasing power of unions. The costs of generous contracts (along with other sociological factors) was eroding the city’s tax base. Local politicians stayed in power by staying friendly with the unions. One hand washed the other.

At the dawn of the 1970’s, the city needed more and more short-term loans from banks. Creative accounting allowed the debt explosion to continue. The city got subsidies from the state and federal governments, but only at the end of its fiscal year, so its deficit ballooned annually before then. The city got generous borrowing terms because it was in the state’s and fed’s best interest (excuse the pun) to deregulate the lending banks, as they were political patrons, too. Eventually, push came to shove.

In June 1975, Rohatyn was appointed to a bipartisan (truly bipartisan!) committee to help New York State governor Hugh Carey draft a bailout plan for the city, three weeks before the date on which the city would be forced into bankruptcy. Fortunately, Carey possessed the right temperament for saving the world.

Read the book to learn more about how the author helped impose some adult supervision in various, serious economic episodes in his career, and more about his career itself.

Strom Thurmond’s America

The Book of the Week is “Strom Thurmond’s America” by Joseph Crespino, published in 2012.

Born in December 1902 in South Carolina, Thurmond grew up in the small-town farming community of Edgefield. His father was an attorney and his family was wealthy and aristocratic.

In 1929, Thurmond became schools superintendent in his hometown. He favored giving a teachers a raise and extending the academic year, funded by the state through a beer tax. He entered into a legal apprenticeship under his father, and in 1933, as a Democrat, was elected to South Carolina’s state senate. Three years later, he became a circuit-court judge, traveling around the state to preside over county-court cases.

During the Depression, the way Thurmond and his fellow southern Democrats defined themselves as “liberal” allowed them to support FDR’s New Deal in order to provide financial aid for white farmers and low-skilled industrial workers in their districts.

After fighting in WWII, Thurmond ran for governor as a Democrat. He was a white-supremacist, mudslinging, drama-queen, populist demagogue while campaigning. Although he did some good things, his actions were always politically expedient. In 1947, he actually delivered on a promise to have South Carolina law enforcement and FBI agents round up 31 (white) men who were suspects in the lynching of a black man. However, a jury of twelve white men acquitted the suspects.

At the time, the United States was helping to establish the United Nations– an international body that concerned itself with respecting human rights. There was pressure on the state of South Carolina to help America maintain a good reputation in that regard, so Thurmond spoke in favor of a federal anti-lynching law. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats wanted to continue to prevent intermingling of blacks and whites so as to not contaminate the genes of the latter. He therefore denigrated every one of president Truman’s civil rights proposals.

And Thurmond was always arguing for state-level laws. To that end, in 1948, he ran for president on the States’ Rights ticket (a third party) in order to play the spoiler against Truman to kill civil rights legislation. But postwar, he returned to a lucrative law practice.

Thurmond then sided with corporate America and the kings of industry in oil, cattle, sugar planters, mercantile and shipping entities, steel, coal, and textiles, etc. He became rabidly anti-Communist and anti-union. Up until 1950 in South Carolina, voting for the Republican Party was NOT anonymous. If one wanted to do so, one had to request a ballot at the polls when he or she voted.

Thurmond ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1954 as a write-in candidate (due to the previous officeholder’s death) even though his fellow Democrats were less than thrilled that he had disloyally run as a third-party candidate in 1948.

A litany of events and groups influenced voters in the South: the Korean War, the Democratic National Committee, the federal goings-on, the CIO, the NAACP, the national labor movement, the upward mobility of urbanites, and backlash (by whites) against southern blacks consequent to Truman’s civil rights legislation.

In the early 1960’s, Thurmond executed a series of far-right-wing campaigns that failed. For one, he pushed for the Nike-Zeus missile program that would help America respond to an attack by the U.S.S.R.; another had him holding hearings to stop JFK from scotching a military education initiative that would spew anti-Communist rhetoric. Finally, in September 1964, Thurmond announced he was a (Barry) Goldwater Republican.

Two prominent legal minds (William Rehnquist and Robert Bork) expressed their opinions that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead to a tattletale culture when it came to civil rights violations. Another indicator of the mentality of then-conservatives was that of blaming the Supreme Court for its pro-desegregation stance in a 1969 ruling in a major case, instead of blaming president Nixon.

Two years later, however, in 1971, Thurmond hired a black staffer (!) He needed to repair his reputation after he backed conservative Democrat congressman Albert Watson, who agreed with him on civil rights issues but ran a dirty campaign in 1970. Thurmond needed to woo moderate Republican voters to get reelected in 1972. Nevertheless, he stuck with Nixon until the end.

In sum, the current COVID face-covering issue in American schools is as controversial as desegregation-busing was from the mid-1960’s into the mid-1970’s. Shortly before he was reelected in 1972, Thurmond actually said, “If it [busing] improves the quality of education, then busing is good. If it doesn’t, then I think it’s bad.” According to their respective memoirs, busing was good for Vernon Jordan, but was socially traumatic and a hardship for Donna Brazile.

So letting local officials decide, pursuant to the majority of their constituents’ preferences, might have been a better policy. And if local officials acted against those preferences, then community organizing and political activism in neighborhoods that believed in education, would likely lead to some changes in the next election year. Dissatisfaction would reach critical mass eventually, in those districts.

Incidentally, in 1975, Senator Joe Biden listened to his constituents in his state of Delaware. He wrote a bill making race irrelevant to assignment of students and teachers to schools.

Read the book to learn of: the skeleton in Thurmond’s closet, his presidential-run results, his one-man filibuster, the historical events (Supreme Court cases and election campaigns) that compelled him to change with the times (or else he would see the end of his political career), the differences between his style of campaigning and that of Jesse Helms, and much more.

Story Days

STORY DAYS
sung to the tune of “Glory Days” with apologies to Bruce Springsteen

We always had a prez who was a big storyteller, every administraTION.
They could throw that fairytale by you,
make you look like a fool, son.
Remembered them the other night watching politics on the tube.
I’m a, news junkie. They were, politicians throughout.
I argue all the time with friends over drinks.
But all we keep talking about is

story days.
DisTRUST at an all-time high. Story days.
In the wink of a speechwriter’s eye. Story days, story days.

Well, Bush 41 told Americans
“Read my lips, no new taxes” when he ran in ’88.
Anytime I want a laugh I’ll look at
all the bragging or denying
Donald Trump has done of late.
He and his party, well they split up.
He’s in limbo, it’s some months gone by now.

I just sit around, getting riled up on social media.
When I see the lying I start chuckling, commenting about

story days.
DisTRUST at an all-time high. Story days.
In the wink of a speechwriter’s eye. Story days, story days.

Think I’ll stay at home tonight
and spout my opinions till people caps-lock my ass.
And I hope no more presidents say,
“I did not have sex with that woman”
[bleep me]. Sorry to be so crass.
Yeah thinking back when Dubya boasted “Mission Accomplished.”
What an inSULT, the bleep bleep.
My faith slipped away.
Obama promised I could keep my doctor, but
bleep story days.

Story days.
DisTRUST at an all-time high. Story days.
In the wink of a speechwriter’s eye. Story days, story days.

Well all wrong, oh no.
Well all wrong, come on now.
Well all wrong, oh no.
Well all wrong, come on now.
Tell the truth, tell the truth.
Tell the truth, tell the truth.
All wrong boys.
No more ducking now.
We keep on going but
we reap what we SOW now.
Bring it home yeah.
Bring it home.
All wrong, all wrong, well all wrong.
Well all wrong, well all wrong.
Well all wrong, well all wrong.
All wrong, let’s go.

The Most Dangerous Man In Detroit

The Book of the Week is “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor” by Nelson Lichtenstein, published in 1995.

Born in September 1907 in West Virginia, Walter Reuther was of German ancestry, raised Lutheran. He quit high school to learn the tool and die trade. In February 1927, he and a friend moved to Detroit for better pay and hours. He eventually made his way to Ford Motor Company, where he quickly rose through the ranks before the Great Depression hit America.

In the early 1930’s, Ford opened a plant to manufacture its Model “A” in the Soviet Union. Americans who believed in socialism were aware that the Stalin-led Soviet government ruled via one party– the Communist, and was perpetrating human rights abuses. But they liked certain economic aspects of its experimental “Five Year Plan.”

Beginning in early 1933, Walter and his brother Victor bicycled a distance of approximately twelve thousand kilometers during the nine months they were meeting with their European political contacts in various countries. In spring 1933, they were already seeing Fascist oppression in major German cities. In late 1933, they began working in a few Soviet industrial complexes to see labor and political conditions for themselves.

By the late 1930’s, the famine caused by Stalin’s disastrous agricultural-reform program prompted peasant-farmers to go to work in the factories that made steel, cars and tractors. In mid-1934, since they were foreigners and skilled middle-managers (training workers in tool and die making), Walter and Victor were permitted to travel between Stalingrad and Moscow to visit construction projects, collective farms and tractor factories. They were chaperoned by Party bureaucrats. They got special treatment, so perhaps they did not see the abuses suffered by unskilled workers. Their experiences led them to believe that the Soviet system was far less of a police-state than Germany’s.

Walter and Victor wanted to believe so badly in a Soviet workers’ paradise that they rationalized away the serious problems (such as impossible-to-meet production quotas, and reports of fancifully high numbers of vehicles manufactured). In 1934, on supervised tours, the brothers also took a look at labor conditions in China and Japan. October 1935 saw them return to the United States.

On May Day of 1936, in major cities across America, various political groups were speaking in the public square with the goal of unionizing workers; some of them– the Socialists, Proletarian and Communist parties– united to form a Popular Front (the joke in Spain was, “the girl with the Popular Front”).

By the mid-1930’s, the auto industry (which included carmakers, parts suppliers, tool and die makers, etc.) consisted of about a half million union members, thirty thousand of whom were in the United Auto Workers (UAW), a national union. In autumn 1936, Walter became a member of that union’s executive board. He planned and got employees to execute work-stoppages and sit-down strikes in order to get the big automakers like GM, Ford, Chrysler and Dodge to grant collective bargaining rights exclusively to the UAW. Other workplaces such as U.S. Steel were inspired to take such actions, too.

Ford was particularly hostile in its anti-union activities, as it had an in-house security department that spied on workers, fired some, and used violence against photographers. GM took measures to protect against productivity losses by rotating its parts suppliers and building new plants in different locations.

In the late 1930’s, Walter launched propaganda campaigns with the distribution of leaflets, and ran pro-union candidates in local political elections in Midwestern cities. In October 1945, he knew that his UAW workers couldn’t win their strike on just solidarity and militancy. He needed support from other ordinary Americans and the federal government. In January 1946, union workers in a bunch of other industries struck, too; electrical, meatpacking, steel milling, and iron mining.

By the late 1940’s, the power of the unions and corruption in government skyrocketed, so that organized crime used bribery, patronage-contracts and and physical violence in order to rule the “… construction industry, short haul trucking, East Coast longshoring , and the bakery and restaurant trades.”

It is a little-publicized datum that in 1962, president Kennedy granted a cut to all taxpayers that favored corporate America, which also got tax breaks. The rich got richer. That same year, members of the UAW executive board included 21 Caucasians, and one African American, whom they knew wouldn’t buck the status quo.

By then, Walter, a liberal, realized he had been incorrect in thinking that the American labor movement would eliminate discrimination in the workplace when the unions and the economy were strong. But he was still stubborn in insisting on an all-or-nothing egalitarianism. Others of his political ilk, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson were willing to compromise with the Dixiecrats (Southern Democrats who opposed civil-rights legislation) to make a little progress rather than none. The following year, Walter had become more flexible, as he was friendly with JFK and his brother.

In July 1967, the race riots in Detroit resulted in the deaths of 43 people and $250 million in property damage. The mayor, and the governor of Michigan assigned a 39-member panel of leaders and influencers in the community to suggest solutions for quelling hostilities. Various actions were taken; among the major ones:

throwing money at low-cost housing;

hiring of black workers at Ford and GM; and

throwing money at black community groups

but nothing seemed to help. The automakers moved their plants from Detroit to Troy and Dearborn.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information on Walter’s trials, tribulations, triumphs, and disputes with the AFL and CIO (unions competing against, and with different views from, the UAW); the growing-pains of the labor movement– how it was affected by: the WWII years (hint– the government ordered it to make war weaponry), political elections, regulation of pricing / wages / production in the steel industry, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War; how and why different automakers’ compensation structures changed, and much more. See this blog’s post “See You In Court” for more information on the pros and cons of unions in America.

Tough Love – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For” by Susan Rice, published in 2019.

Rice– of Jamaican ancestry on her mother’s side, and African American on her father’s side– spent her childhood in Washington, D.C. She was a key player in foreign policy during the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In economics and foreign policy, president Ronald Reagan truly led a “Revolution” that has lasted forty years. American political, economic, and even cultural hegemony began to be taken for granted. The way his administration papered over the downsides of the United States’ military intervention in the world’s hotspots (except for Lebanon), made “might makes right” acceptable again, less than a decade (!) after Vietnam.

Rice (post-Obama) had an awakening similar to that of Jeanne Kirkpatrick (post-Reagan) when she naively wrote, “At the time, the notion we could send U.S. forces to a faraway land to save innocent lives only to have our lives taken away was infuriating and bewildering.”

Yet Rice sometimes favored sending in troops (through the UN) during the many instances of bloody unrest (some genocidal) that reared their ugly heads on various continents in the 1990’s into the 2000’s. She put in her two cents in heated, emotionally stressful debates over civil wars in Somalia, Rwanda, Libya (which eventually became a quagmire– unsurprisingly), Syria, etc.

Often, the alleged initial mission of NATO was to stem the proliferation of deaths of civilians. But in the long run– even with all kinds of assistance (military, political, humanitarian) from democratic countries– civilians in the Third World cannot break their homeland’s vicious dictatorship cycle (See this blog’s entire category “Third-World-Country-Victims of War and/or Dictator”).

Another set of repeated epic fails through the decades (as recently as the 2010’s) has been the United States’ attempts at “Vietnamization.” During 2012, Rice and other high-level officials wrung their hands regarding Syria. Rice wrote, “President Obama decided in 2013 to join our Sunni Arab and Turkish partners in arming and later training vetted Syrian rebels who were fighting Assad [Syria’s leader]. Some were terrorists.”

A simple reason for the failure of “Vietnamization” is that the people are being given fish (short-term handouts) with too much emphasis on military operations. This quick fix is provided by short-sighted politicians who have their eye on reelection or political expedience. The alternative is teaching the people how to fish (a system of democracy that jives with their culture), which is expensive, and takes years or decades, and might not be worth doing, pursuant to the strategic interests of the “liberators.” Installing democracy is like installing new software– it’s initially problematic, and it will require frequent patches and updates, and occasionally third-level tech support, indefinitely.

Read the book to learn of the smear campaigns launched against Rice (including that led by Lindsey Graham after Benghazi), how she built her career and what she did, the different mentalities of the UN and U.S. government agencies that handled foreign policy, the different personalities of all kinds of people whom Rice encountered in her lifetime, and almost everything you ever wanted to know about her life.

Politics of Conscience

The Book of the Week is “Politics of Conscience, A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith” by Patricia Ward Wallace, published in 1995.

The author wrote,

“Or perhaps it was that after four years, the nation had witnessed his unseemly bullying, insulting, and humiliating tactics for too long…”

of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). In the spring of 1954, the U.S. Army held hearings in order to give McCarthy a taste of his own medicine.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) took over her deceased husband’s U.S. Senate seat when he died, and was reelected in 1940. She received special treatment from Bangor Daily News columnist May Craig, in that Craig was assigned specifically to favorably cover Smith, but hardly ever, any other politician.

Smith was best known– aside from her gender, along with six other senators– for issuing a “Declaration of Conscience” in June 1950, that took McCarthy to task (even though she and he were both Republicans) for his dictatorial methods in rooting out accused Communists.

After Smith delivered an accompanying speech on the Senate floor, her group took no follow-up actions, ingenuously thinking that that one act of protestation would convince the rest of the government and ordinary Americans that McCarthy was violating people’s civil rights in capitalizing on Cold War hysteria. He retaliated against her, (as politicians of his ilk will) by pressuring senate-committee-leaders to deny her membership and assignments she wanted.

In 1952, the book U.S.A. Confidential was published. It was full of lies and smears against all parties who were automatically treated as guilty of associating with Communists (many through only the most tenuous of connections), or who were automatically Communists by virtue of a simple accusation (by their enemies, of course) against them, whether unfounded or not.

Smith sued the book’s authors and publisher for libel, as several of the book’s pages mentioned her. The defendants used every possible tactic to delay litigation, but finally agreed to settle the case in autumn 1956. It was a hollow victory for Smith.

In the 1950’s, some members of the United States government galvanized citizens to turn their fears of nuclear war into hatred of one enemy: the former Soviet Union. Nowadays, fears and hatreds are scattered between or among all kinds of groups, absent the threat of nuclear war.

One way American governmental authorities are again attempting to galvanize the people against one enemy is to direct it against a disease, through controlling the population in various ways.

And yes, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is soon to arrive, bringing with it threats to national security. But the government has known this anniversary would arrive, for the last twenty years; the most recent administration, for the last eight months. Just a thought.

Read the book to learn much more about Smith’s career, life and times.

The Rape of Bangla Desh

The Book of the Week is “The Rape of Bangla Desh” by Anthony Mascarenhas, published in 1971.

In March 1969, Pakistan got a new leader named Khan. The reason was that dissatisfaction with Khan’s predecessor had reached critical mass among various parties that were keeping him in power, including the military.

Khan made the following campaign promises: “drain the swamp” in the government, and hold elections that would establish parliamentary (representative, civilian rather than military) government, pursuant to a constitution. The sovereignty of Pakistan had not held elections since its 1947 inception via the partition of India (amid excessive bloodshed, religious hatreds and a caste system that retarded the country’s economic, cultural and social growth for decades; see this blog’s post, “Freedom At Midnight”).

In November 1969, Khan claimed he was still working on the new constitution. He made other announcements on other issues that made it pretty obvious to politically astute people that he was turning out to be yet another dictator. He declared that Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier (in West Pakistan) would become separate states again, and changed how votes would be tabulated, territorially.

Khan set dates for steps that helped Pakistan prepare for its elections, which would allegedly be held in October 1970. But they weren’t. In early November 1970, a tidal wave and cyclone hit the coastal areas of East Bengal. Khan then had a great excuse to postpone the elections until December.

Khan wrote the new constitution, which contained “small print”– a Legal Framework Order– that basically gave Khan unlimited powers; plus murky language that would cause endless arguments over the application and jurisdiction of laws between the provinces and Pakistan’s federal government.

However, in his evil scheme to become Pakistan’s supreme ruler through “divide and conquer” Khan’s new vote-tabulation method allowed Bengalis (of East Pakistan) to obtain too much representation in the national assembly, in the elections (when they were finally held). West Pakistanis became resentful, although they had previously enjoyed the lion’s share of control of governmental affairs for decades.

By February 1971, Khan had been executing various political machinations, including dissolving his civilian Cabinet. He said that he couldn’t let civilians rule Pakistan’s government just yet, as there was a national-security emergency– conflicts among East and West Pakistan, and India. The military had to handle them.

Unsurprisingly, in the first week of March 1971, there began more than three weeks’ worth of violence, rioting and looting, with Bengalis’ agitating to become an independent Bangladesh. To sum it up, “Pakistanis are intensely patriotic people and could not for one moment believe that their government was deliberately misinforming them so terribly.”

Read the book to learn the details of this “textbook example” of how actions taken by an alpha male with hubris syndrome (whose actions backfired!) led to circumstances that resulted in independence for a specific group of people in a particular territory (not without: serious sacrifices of human lives, the usual ethnic, tribal and religious warfare– including what some have defined as genocide; plus linguistic and other issues, and millions of refugees).

Scandal’s In the Air

SCANDAL’S IN THE AIR
sung to the tune of “Love Is In the Air” with apologies to John Paul Young

Scandal’s in the air
with every news item I see.
Scandal’s in the air.
Impeachments, fill people with glee.
Trump, Cuomo and Biden are targets.
Greene and Norman were actually fined.
Due process, we must believe in.
But justice is not always blind.

Scandal’s in the air
with every celebrity I see.
Scandal’s in the air.
Zuckerberg’s money bothers me.
People don’t like, to see Obama maskless.
Others feel Britney Spears’ pain.
Bill Gates met Jeffrey Epstein.
Some say, what Fauci says is inane.

Scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.
Oh, oh, oh, oh

Scandal’s in the air
with every doomsday thing I see.
Scandal’s in the air.
Earth is burning with a capital B.
The Pope was saved from dangerous mail.
Spain was offended by a Snickers ad.
Barbie wasn’t Asian at the Olympics.
Kim Kardashian’s mask pics were “bad.”

Scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.
Oh, oh, oh, oh

Oh, scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.
Scandal’s in the air.

Life’s A Campaign – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Life’s A Campaign, What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success” by Chris Matthews, published in 2007. This quick, lighthearted read gave a few tips, through a series of specific examples– some autobiographical– on how to develop, manage and maintain political relationships. Incidentally, thirteen years after the book’s writing, the author– a journalist and TV-show host– had become psychologically burnt out from the political shenanigans he covered.

The author advised the reader who attended a political event to always stand on the far right side in a group photo. That way, the reader’s name would appear first in the photo’s caption in the news article. He also briefly described the exploits of Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill and JFK, saying they were all war heroes before becoming politicians. However, he neglected to mention that each man had a crack public relations team that glorified their histories and papered over their past failures, to help them get elected. Read the book to learn more about the author’s and others’ political adventures.

“The sad truth we learn from all of this is that it’s one thing to call your critics ‘liars,’ but to regain the political edge you must prove they are.” The author was referring to John Kerry’s unsuccessful 2004 presidential bid, but such dishonesty is part and parcel of politics, egged on by the media. Both politicians and the media have gotten wily messaging and optics down to a science (but right now, NOT literally!).

As is well known, the media are currently whipping up a frenzy over– not a presidential campaign– but over a highly contagious, potentially fatal virus-pandemic that has variants. As is now the norm, the messengers and their bosses’ utterances have been characterized by lack of transparency. Obviously, they benefit vaccine makers, mask sellers, COVID drug peddlers etc.; most of those messengers and bosses are failing to disclose their financial interests in the profit-seeking aspects of the whole kit and caboodle. Ho hum.