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The kid aren't all right

Uncle Sam, hatred, and hypocrisy

Spirit of Midwifery Conference

NOFX: fun-loving hedonists
turned radicals

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Last April, the Children’s Defense Fund reported that more than one million African-American children live in “deep poverty,” in households with incomes less than half the US government’s already inadequate poverty level. This is up dramatically from early 2000, when “only” 686,000 black children were that poor — an accomplishment certain to be deleted from George W. Bush’s re-election résumé. The story of this report received a short burst of attention, meriting mention in the New York Times and other mainstream venues before it quickly faded.

The coverage given to this story was soon eclipsed by the revelation that leading right-wing moral-crusader, Republican political strategist, and educational magnate William J. Bennett was a serious problem gambler. According to various reports, Bennett, a onetime secretary of education, and past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was a casino owners’ dream who lost more than $8 million playing Las Vegas slot machines during the last decade alone. Americans were shocked and in some cases delighted to learn that the nation’s leading preacher of virtue was incapable of reining in his compulsion to “cycle” massive amounts of surplus wealth through the slot- and video-game machinery of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

The first chapter of Bennett’s bestseller The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Moral Stories, a compilation of morally instructive tales written specifically for children, is titled “Self-Discipline.” “There is much unhappiness and personal distress in the world,” Bennett writes in that chapter’s introduction, “because of failures to control and temper appetites, passions, and impulses.” The second chapter is titled “Compassion.” Compassion “comes close to the very heart of moral awareness, to seeing in one’s neighbor another self.” “Treat no one,” Bennett instructs, “with callous disregard.”

Too bad Bennett and his Republican ilk don’t see the need to cycle a few more million (or better yet, billion) dollars worth of enrichment through the bodies and minds of America’s growing number of “deeply” poor black children, who are now proclaimed even more irrelevant than usual in the face of America’s virtuous effort to “liberate” Iraq, to the great “collateral” advantage of Halliburton, Bechtel, and other needy subjects lining up for their share of the general welfare. Talk about your “callous disregard.”

How darkly appropriate, then, to read the title of a recent article criticizing Bennett and Bush’s educational ideas and policies, which work to undercut the nation’s core commitment to public schooling: “Gambling with the Children.” How fitting to learn from sociologist David Nibert that legalized gambling is a “fiscal shell game” whereby state governments pretend to boost school spending while cutting or merely maintaining already inadequate funding streams for the nation’s disproportionately black and Hispanic public schools.

How sad, too, to see the mainstream discussion of Bennett’s nasty little habit discussed in isolation from social facts and stuck at the Charles Dickens level, arguing in bourgeois-moralist terms about the propriety of a rich man’s behavior. Mainstream commentators had nothing to say about the deeper immorality involved in the creation and maintenance of a social structure whereby one such man can afford to entertain himself by dropping in machines a sum greater than the lifetime earnings of most of his fellow citizens.

None of this irony, we can be sure, was surprising to Henry Giroux. For more than two decades, Giroux has combined left social, cultural, and educational theory to defend American children, public education, and democracy against the depredations of American racism and corporate capitalism. The result is a prolific body of morally engaged scholarship, spread over more than 25 books citing an impressive range of empirical and theoretical sources. Beneath this remarkable outpouring lies a simple concern with the predicament of youth. The truest measure of America’s performance as a democratic society, Giroux argues, “is the condition of its children.”

By this standard, America is a dismal failure, with too many American children living poorly, without decent housing and health care, attending decrepit, under-funded schools, and subjected to a hopelessness-inducing onslaught of reactionary pedagogy within and beyond school walls. Giroux’s latest book, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear, provides a horrifying catalogue of forces assaulting youth, poor and minority youth in particular, in the post-9/11 era.

Those forces include the ascendancy of a “belligerent nationalism” that constructs community on the basis of fear and mindless conformity rather than democratic possibility. This dominant right-wing patriotism cultivates a climate of permanent public emergency to “remove the application of government power from the fields of ethical and political responsibility.” It “confuses dissent with treason,” democracy with capitalism, freedom with consumerism, culture with commercialism, and justice with brute force. It is incapable of imagining meaningful collective human experience outside the realms of private and commodified experience, proclaiming that “social problems can only be addressed through private solutions.” It “collapses the [very] idea of the social under the weight of a market philosophy that ... views community as an obstacle to market-based values, that stresses excessive individualism, privatization, commercialization and the bottom line.”

Increasingly stripped of its social-democratic “helping functions” and reduced to its expanding “policing” role, the American public sector is being transformed into a repressive “garrison state.” It acts as little more than the authoritarian agent of capital’s dictates, replacing compassion with repression and criminalizing social problems that result from the deepening of socioeconomic and related racial inequalities. It generates racially disparate mass incarceration and a savage assault on domestic civil liberties and a preference for military intervention over humanitarian assistance abroad.

This is bad for most Americans. It is especially bad for the nation’s youth, particularly poor and minority kids, increasingly turned into raw material for the burgeoning, expensive, and taxpayer-financed prison- and military-industrial complexes. These hypervulnerable segments of the population are targeted by capitalism’s wider attack on institutions and organizations that have traditionally provided support for children’s rights: public and private welfare agencies, labor unions, churches, public education, and the family. They are directly assaulted by the Bush educational agenda, a powerful attack on the core democratic essence of public schooling. With its lockstep emphasis on standardized testing, “drill-and-skill” teaching, and what it calls “parental choice”—the right of relatively privileged parents to escape failed public schools to private schools with vouchers that steal funds from already under-financed schools — the Bush plan promotes a “culture of failure” among minority kids. Many of these lack the “cultural and academic resources” to negotiate “the high-stakes sorting mechanisms of a state- and corporate-regulated testing machine.”

At the same time, the Bush agenda pre-empts teachers’ capacity to cultivate critical thinking, enlisting them as agents of the corporate state rather than civic democracy. It deepens existing racial and related socioeconomic inequalities since “standardized tests have always favored the rich and powerful” and would be immediately suspended the minute they began to work to the advantage of the marginal and non-affluent. Those who don’t accommodate this reactionary, narrow-minded pedagogical regime are passed on to the criminal justice system in the authoritarian, all-or-nothing name of “zero tolerance.”

American youth’s predicament is worsening also in what Giroux calls “Higher Education, Inc.,” itself increasingly absorbed into the corporate, neoliberal agenda. The means of academia’s corporatization include the ascendancy of bottom-line (profit-loss) measurements of academic “efficiency,” endemic use of superexploited adjunct and temporary faculty labor (“creating a permanent underclass of professional part-time workers in higher education”), the spread of digital “distance education,” and a growing assault on faculties’ intellectual property rights. It doesn’t help, Giroux adds, that “many left and liberal academics have retreated into an arcane discourse that offers them mostly the safe ground of the professional recluse” and does little to inspire their students and nurture critically engaged and democratic citizenship.

What is to be done? Giroux aims his recommendations mainly at educators, journalists, and other “cultural workers.” Intellectuals, Giroux contends, “represent the conscience of society.” Their role is vital because they “shape the conditions under which future generations learn about themselves and their relations to the outside world” and “engage questions that are by their very nature moral and political rather than simply cost-effective and technical.” Giroux’s main counsel is that educators, scholars, and policymakers work to “revitalize a language of resistance and possibility.” This language “embraces a militant utopianism.” It refuses to “stand still in the face of human suffering,” and recognizes children as society’s most important resource. Giroux concludes by quoting Derrida: “We must do and think the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen.”

Paul L. Street is the author of The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation, available online at www.cul-chicago.org.

Source: In These Times

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By John Brinker

Founded by a high school student in 1965, Fifth Estate (FE) is today the longest-running English-language anarchist paper in North America. It began as Detroit’s journal of the 60s counterculture. Like underground papers in other cities, FE covered the emerging scene’s heady combination of political revolt, music (think MC5), sex, drug culture and direct action against the Vietnam War.

It distinguished itself by embracing ideas that looked beyond the “New Left” politics popular at the time. Unlike most other papers of its kind, FE survived the 60s and grew increasingly radical over the years, winning over a few thousand loyal readers around the world.

In 1975, as success was starting to take FE in a more mainstream direction, a change of editorship took the magazine firmly into the realm of radical anti-authoritarianism, and the magazine has never looked back.

In the 70s FE began to promote new thinkers such as Fredy Perlman and David Watson; in the 80s and 90s it championed the work of John Zerzan and Hakim Bey, all known for wide-ranging critiques of civilization itself.

FE has been consistently anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-militarist. In its pages, the journal questions technology, wage-slavery, the gender binary, and every other institution of modern life, while promoting passionate engagement with life, re-connection with the natural world and radical festivity as ways out of our cultural dead-end.

Recently, FE relocated from its original home in Detroit to a very different environment, the rolling countryside of central Tennessee. It was inevitable that the FE collective would reach out to establish a connection with the South’s hotbed of discontent, Asheville.

Despite its respectable age, FE’s radical nature and lack of advertising makes it a labor of love, and every issue could be the last. With that in mind, members of the FE editorial collective will be visiting Asheville to solicit modest financial support in order meet costs to print its 362nd issue. As an inducement, they have recruited some of Asheville’s finest musical entertainment.

A benefit for Fifth Estate will be held at the Asheville Community Resource Center on Friday, Aug. 29 at 7pm. Performers will include Hope and Anchor, Dig Shovel Dig, Sugar and the Plums, Glossolalia, DJ Ta$temaker, and more. FE editors will give an informal talk on the history of the magazine and its place in the world of radical thought.

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NOFX: fun-loving hedonists turned radicals

The War on Errorism
NOFX
Fat Wreck Chords

Review by James Vassilopoulos

Veteran US punks NOFX are not your typical band. You will not see the ad for their latest CD, The War on Errorism, on television after the doggy biscuit commercial. NOFX’s punk-ska is not mindless and simple, but smart, engaging and complex music.

NOFX have gone through something of a transformation, from fun-loving hedonists to radicals. Before The War on Errorism, as they explain in the album’s liner notes, NOFX were not known for expressing political views, but “maybe it’s time that we are.” The band says it is important for people to share information rather than rely on the government or the corporate media.

The song that explains this change is the widely played “Franco un-American.” This poppy-punk song begins with siren-like guitar sounds. The song’s thoughtful and clever lyrics explain that the band had never thought about the planet’s problems or the wrongs of imperialism. Then the band members read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Two key events seem to have got up the nose of NOFX and made them interested in the world and politics. The first was the stealing of the US presidential election by George Bush and Dick Cheney. On the enhanced-CD version of The War on Errorism there are excerpts from a documentary called Unprecedented, which exposes the electoral fraud. The second is the post-9/11 US “war on terrorism,” which is really a justification for the US to unleash its imperial fist and brutal jack-boot on the Third World.

NOFX continues to refuse to play the marketing game. The band stopped doing interviews because they were tired of being misquoted and exploited. MTV wanted a video of one of their songs, but the band refused to make one.

The War on Errorism has depth, and is full of really good tunes. There’s the hard-core “Separation of Church and Skate,” with its almost-nuclear energy and its 1 million guitar strums per minute. The song criticizes the current punk scene’s timidity.

The softer “Mattersville” is a utopian vision of where older punks end up. There is the boppy “Anarchy camp,” which is full of NOFX’s brassy and keyboard-fuelled ska. “Whoops, I Od’d” is surreal.

Lyrically, one of the best songs is “Regaining unconsciousness.” This is a 21st-century version of the anti-Nazi poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, “First They Came For the Jews”: “First they put away the dealers, keep our kids safe and off the street/Then they put away the prostitutes, keep married men cloistered at home/Then they shooed away the bums, then they bashed and beat the queers/Turned away asylum seekers, fed us suspicions and fears/We didn’t raise our voice, we didn’t make a fuss/It’s funny there was no one left to notice when they came for us.”

Around the time that I had been listening to The War on Errorism, I was also listening to The Very Best of Punk and Disorderly (available from www.cherryred.co.uk). This is an excellent compilation of alternative British punk music from the early 1980s. This music was influenced by fears of an impending nuclear catastrophe as the US accelerated the arms race, the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US, and the revolution in Nicaragua and national liberation movements in Central America.

Punk and Disorderly contains Vice Squad’s enchanting “Last rockers,” the Newtown Neurotics’ “Kick out the Tories” and The Insane shouts about “El Salvador.” NOFX’s War on Errorism continues this fine tradition of loud and angry rebel punk music.

According to Punkvoter.com, one of the web sites listed in The War on Errorism notes, only 38 percent of US young people voted in the 2000 presidential election. The site has an article by the punk band Anti-Flag called “George W. is a Gangsta.” It urges young people to get political: “We must organize! We must demonstrate! We must support one another! When you choose the lesser of two evils, you are choosing evil. Don’t get us wrong — the Republicans must be voted out of office on November 5! But we want to encourage you to look beyond the two dominant parties when you vote, and think about who will really ... fight for what you believe.”

Source: Green Left Weekly

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