A Timely Warning from the Mayans?

USUALLY, AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, Americans are too busy searching for holiday bargains (or, if they watch Fox News, worrying about losing the imaginary “War on Christmas”) to focus on world events. This year it’s different.

Mayan ruins.

Fear is building with each passing hour as we count down to the Mayan Apocalypse, just two days away. You think the fiscal cliff is a concern? Not really a problem. Let them raise your taxes if you’re a millionaire! Who cares! Not one taxpayer is going to be around to pay the bills after December 21, 2012. The planets and stars are going to align and bam!

That will be that.

We’re never going to know if President Obama and Speaker John Boehner might have worked out some kind of compromise. We’ll never learn who would have been this season’s winner on The Voice. The Chicago Cubs will never ever reach the World Series again.

Neither will anyone else.

Some skeptics, of course, may still be saying, “Screw the Mayans. I’m going Christmas shopping.” This writer admits to being skeptical, himself, until he received this ominous letter from his dentist, who claims to be “retiring” after 46 years in the field. Look at the date! My god, he’s just trying not to create a panic:

Now that you understand how short the time you—personally—have left on earth you might like to know a little about these Mayans, who somehow knew, thirteen centuries ago, that we were going to be screwed. First, they were math wizards, expert at charting stars and planets and heavenly cycles. They built impressive temples and developed a written language. They understood the concept of “zero” at a time when our European ancestors were trying to divide and multiply using Roman numerals. The Mayan people were skilled farmers, working communally to build vast reservoirs and irrigation channels. They grew corn and beans and actually liked squash.

An advanced people.

They had a monetary system (involving jade and cacao beans, the stuff of chocolate). They lived in cities like Tikal, population 60,000. They traded for hundreds of miles up and down the coast of what we know as Central America and out across the Caribbean. And they computed time backwards and forwards. According to their figures the first date in human history was August 13, 3114 B.C. Or is it August 10? My history books disagree.

Wikipedia says: August 11.

Who cares! The Mayans knew we we’re doomed. They knew it wouldn’t make any difference, not even if Obama kicked Boehner square in the nuts.

THEN AGAIN, MAYBE THEY WEREN’T SO SMART. Their civilization collapsed around 900 A.D.; and somehow they failed to predict that.

Maybe the Mayans are wrong about December 21; but maybe they still have a warning to offer. From what we know, as Mayan population grew, farmers cut down the forests and planted more and more crops. With forest cover gone there was heavy erosion and fields produced smaller and smaller yields. According to archaeologist Richardson Gill, when a long drought hit their homeland around A.D. 900 water tables dropped so fast, “There was nothing they could do. There was nowhere they could go. Their whole world, as they knew it, was in the throes of a burning, searing, brutal drought...There was nothing to eat. Their water reservoirs were depleted, and there was nothing to drink.”

It might make you feel safer knowing that the Mayans never saw their own collapse coming. Maybe we have plenty of time left. Maybe the Cubs do reach the World Series in this century.

Well, that’s the moral of that story. It’s time to quit worrying and head for the mall to do some serious shopping. When you get home, maybe, turn on the television and relax and watch Fox News. At Fox News, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, fear itself and labor unions. 

And Muslims.

Oh, and gay marriage.

Otherwise, Fox News is like a powerful sedative. Gretchen Carlson doesn’t scare fans with stories about melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels. Sean Hannity won’t bring up altered weather patterns and wonder why the Mississippi River was almost unnavigable last summer. The weather babes at Fox aren’t concerned about why Superstorm Sandy packed an unusually powerful punch. Megyn Kelly doesn’t care if the Ogallala aquifer, which underlies the heartland of America, is being drained at a fearful rate putting farming at risk. (Even the Wall Street Journal took note of that story). No one who works for Rupert Murdoch or Roger Ailes is ever going to admit there’s a problem when toxic chemicals show up all over the world in women’s breast milk or when traces of Prozac show up in fish. Nope. Nothing to worry about when it comes to the environment. 

Even the fish are relaxed.

Did you hear? Steve Doocy says Obama is crazy because he’s pushing solar energy. So, sit back and crank up the volume because Sarah Palin is coming on after a commercial. Listen to her coo seductively, “Oh, baby, oh baby, drill me baby, drill me!”

After that, it’s time to listen to Bill O'Reilly fume about the “War on Christmas.” So, yeah, screw those  Mayans.

What did they know?

Buy this t-shirt if you dare.

The Tea Party and the "Unplugging Granny" Delusion

NOT ONCE, IN MY WILDEST DREAMS, did I ever imagine writing a defense of the Internal Revenue Service.

For the second time this week, however, Tea Party Governor Paul LaPage of Maine has compared the IRS to the Gestapo. April 15 might not qualify as a national holiday. Still, it's hard to follow Mr. LaPage's thinking. The governor backed off a similar comparison earlier in the week. Then he told reporters yesterday that, sure, he was right all along:

"What I am trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated. Maybe the IRS is not quite as bad - yet," LePage told listeners, end-ing with that last note of foreboding.

Reporters couldn't quite grasp his logic. Asked if the IRS was headed in that direction, LePage responded, "They're headed in that direction."

Still baffled, someone in the audience wondered if LaPage knew that the Gestapo had played a role in the deaths of millions. It was kind of a softball question and Governor LaPage leaped at a chance to show that he was up on his Tea Party history. "Yeah, they killed a lot of people," he admitted. Someone else wondered if he really thought the IRS "was headed in the direction of killing a lot of people."

LePage answered again: "Yeah."

THAT'S WHEN IT HITS YOU, the problem with what passes in Tea Party circles for history, their paranoia, their fun-house mirror view of current realities. It's their "Unplugging Granny" delusion. Google "Obama and tyranny," for starters, and you get 8,990,000 results.

One of the first carries the the ominous title:  In 2014, the Obama Dictatorship Will Be Complete. You figure it's going to be about gas chambers and tanks in the streets of American cities. But this particular story by Doug Book is about an evil plot to impose government health care on uninsured citizens. It's a chilling tale about "the Manchurian Candidate...[in] the White House." About President Obama's plan to pack some health care panel with "a select coterie of like-minded, Marxist plutocrats, eager to wrench by any means from the American people their last remaining vestige of individual liberty[.]"

It hits you again, even more forcefully. That the Tea Party doesn't understand the meaning of words like "tyranny" or "Gestapo." You're certainly entitled to do a double-take when someone uses the term "Marxist plutocrats." But give Book a pass.

Let's stick with this unreasoning fear of a growing "tyranny" in America.

What is tyranny, Govenor LaPage? Tyranny is when judges lose their seats on the bench, and their lives, if they go against power-mad rulers. It's not the same when seven of nine current U. S. Supreme Court justices, asked to rule on the health care law, were appointed by Republican presidents. Tyranny is when a dictator closes down a legislature, entirely, and rules through blood-letting. Not quite the same when the GOP controls the U. S. House of Representatives and votes 33 times for repeal. Tyranny is when a writer like Doug Book gets arrested and handed over to the Gestapo for horrific torture. (Book might take consolation knowing that it is liberals, President Obama, in particular, who oppose even waterboarding.) Tyranny is when the courts in Nazi Germany order the beheading of a girl named Sophie Scholl and her brother, after they pass out anti-Nazi leaflets. Not the same as a country where Tea Party "patriots" can post freely on the internet and show up at anti-Obama rallys heavily armed. Tyranny is when you cancel elections completely, or try to block your foes when they show up at the polls, ironically, a popular measure with GOP state legislatures these days. It's not about free elections this November, it's not about a country with a free speech and free press absolutely intact, where opinion polls, freely and regularly conducted, show President Obama with only a very slim lead. Tyranny is packing families in cattle cars, carrying them off to Auschwitz, gassing innocent men, women and children. Tyranny is not about extending health care to 30,000,000 Americans who lack it.

TO CONFUSE HEALTH CARE AND TYRANNY IN THIS FASHION is to make us wonder if people like the Maine governor could even tell the difference between a Gestapo agent and a Girl Scout.

Here's a hint:  one of them is armed only with cookies.

Recognize tyranny?
It's not quite the same as a doctor with a stethoscope.

Happy Fathers' Day: A Problem in American Education

WHEN PRESIDENT OBAMA TOOK OFFICE, I had high hopes that education policy would improve. I hoped he and Arne Duncan, his new Secretary of Education, would prove to be more realistic.

They couldn’t possibly be so naive as to believe No Child Left Behind was a success. It could only get better. Or so I thought.

You’d think President Obama—who grew up without a father—would know better; but Mr. Duncan goes around preaching at every turn that to fix education all we really need to do is find better teachers. Duncan makes it sound like the failings of our schools are entirely related to teachers.

We need to be realistic.

Sure, there are bad teachers. I’m up in Maine right now, at the start of a bicycle trip across the country. In the Bangor Daily News I see the kind of story that Fox News will highlight for the next two weeks. Rob Mocarsky, 41, a kindergarten teacher, recently pleaded guilty to a charge of “creating child pornography.” Now he faces fifteen to thirty years in a federal prison. The article explains that Mocarsky did a lot of dress-up activities with his students, pirates and fairies and such. At various times he managed to trick four little girls into staying after school, and took pictures of them in various costumes...and....well...he’s a rotten bastard.

By all means, let’s get rid of bad teachers; and let’s be sure we put people like Mocarsky in jail.

Preparing to start a bicycle trip across America.

BUT LET’S NOT FORGET THAT THERE ARE all kinds of problems in our schools that have their roots in the home, as well. That means we have to be honest about what school reform can do and what it cannot.

In the same paper today, another kindergarten teacher, Amy Lake, was in the news. Last week, her estranged husband shot her dead and also their two children. In the same paper, in a similar story, Leah Gordon, 9, and brother, Christian, 8, watched their father Nathaniel chase down their mother Sarah and shoot her too.

The question I keep coming back to when I see stories like this is: What school reform laws are going to address the needs of families like these?

At times recently the news on American fathers has been bleak.

In 1960 only 5% of children in America were born out of wedlock. In 2008 the figure was 41%. I’m a liberal, so I know that might not be the end of the world. But the problem for kids is that so many fathers are absent in their lives. A Pew Research Center study recently found that 27% of fathers with kids 18 or younger live away from at least one of their children and many of those fathers admit they haven’t seen their child in more than a year.

Way to go, dad!

Even worse, the poorest families are the most likely to have children born out of wedlock—and to have fathers who are absent. As a result, problems for poor children are compounded. For black children, 72% are born out of wedlock; for Hispanics, 59%; for white children, 37%. For fathers who don’t have a high school diploma the numbers are 65%, for those who graduate from high school, 51%, for fathers with a college degree, only 13%.

Really: if we wanted to fix our system of education the best place might be to start by teaching would-be-dads to use condoms.

At any rate, I wish every committed dad in America a “Happy Fathers’ Day,” no matter their race, creed or color.


P. S. I may not be updating my blog too often for a while. I'm bicycling across the United States to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

(If you would like to read about the trip go to:  viall4diabetes2011.blogspot.com.)

If you would like to donate to help find a cure for type-1 diabetes please click HERE!

Arne Duncan: The Armor of Achilles

Sunday, under the heading:  NEWS THAT WAS INEVITABLE, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama administration want to offer states "relief"  before schools all over the nation begin running afoul of penalties written into the No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) in 2002.

The problem is so simple even a caveman could have predicted it.  Nine years ago, with bi-partisan support and great fanfare, Congress passed a law which promised that ALL children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014.  Penalties were included if states failed to keep make "adequate yearly progress" toward this noble goal. 

The problem from the start was that noble goals aren't necessarily realistic.  It was kind of like calling World War I "the war to end all wars."  No matter how ringing the phrase, perfection has a tendency to be well beyond humanity's straining reach.

What exactly went wrong?  First, most states spent six years lowering standards and then gradually raising them again, to insure they showed "progress" in testing numbers, no matter how bogus, to avoid the initial round of penalties under NCLB.  From 2002 to 2008, almost no real gains were made.  In the 2008 elections many of the original backers of the law were kicked out of office; and President Obama and Arne Duncan took over shortly after and began talking about new and improved standards.  Duncan would end the "race to the bottom" which began when states began scuffling to avoid penalties and launch a true "Race to the Top."

One set of standards had failed.  What we needed, Duncan insisted, were BETTER standards.  It's kind of like when one diet plan fails. What the poor dieter tells himself is this:  "It's not my fault.  What I need is a BETTER diet plan." 

Today, nine years into the Age of the Testing Fix, an era when we are repeatedly told that we can test our way to success, states like Arkansas and Kansas are clamoring for relief.  They can't reach the noble goals set under NCLB by 2014, and can't promise that every child will be proficient in reading and math in 2 1/2 years.  They say it isn't fair to hold them accountable for testing targets set under the Bush-era law...when they're working hard to write new standards and draw up new tests to align with these standards, to comply (this time) with rules under the "Race to the Top" initiative being pushed by the Obama administration.

If you're an ordinary, brown-bag educator, the type who sits at a real classroom desk and grades real papers from real students for half your lunch every day, and eating your bologna sandwich is your idea of a relaxing break, you knew in 2002 this was coming. 

I dare anyone to read the first hundred stories you come across about "raising standards" in U. S. education today.  I doubt you will find a single sentence that includes these words:  "students," "must work harder," because in the last two years, I haven't seen those words yet.  The theorists and bureaucrats keep talking about writing new standards, about "bench-marking" U. S. standards to match with standards in countries like Finland and Japan and South Korea. 

We keep talking about testing and standards and miss the essential point.  It's like putting on the armor of Achilles.  Just because you WEAR the armor of Achilles, that doesn't make you Achilles.

Let's say, as a society, we were really committed to excellence in education.  Let's say we didn't have one extra dollar to spend.  Could we still raise standards?  Of course we could.  And we wouldn't need Arne Duncan to tell us how.

Let's say every teacher in American set their head and hand to working harder every day.  That would certainly help;  but let's be honest about the problems we face in American education and admit that we have to expect students to work harder, too.  Let's admit that parents have to stop whining if teachers are demanding.  Let's admit that if we want true higher standards, our children will need to spend more time on academics when they get home.

At some point, the diet PLAN isn't the critical factor.  The dieter has to be committed.  No plan will work unless the dieter is willing to push away the plate. 

We don't need the Department of Education to tell us what to do and how to do it--and if they really want to help, let the experts come into the classrooms and show us how it's really done.  We don't need to rewrite standards.  As a society, we have to be committed to education. 

Standards on paper don't make the Japanese schools better.  Japanese students are simply willing to work harder than American students, generally, and Japanese parents are more likely than American parents to approve of a heavy workload when educators require it.

Ever hear that America's schools are failing when compared to Japanese schools?

In the spring of 2009, the number of U. S. students taking the SAT’s climbed to a record 1.55 million. 

Those who took four years of English and three years of math had better scores, averaging 151 points higher than those who didn’t.  Go figure.  They worked harder and it showed.

Since No Child Left Behind went into full effect in 2006, however, the average score for white students had dropped 2 points. 

The average for African Americans and Puerto Ricans was down 14 points.

The average for Asian Americans was up 36.  It's not the standards the government puts on paper that matter.  It's the standards people set for themselves.

The armor of Achilles isn't the key to any battle.