Stan Goff
February 9, 2007

Between the hyperventilated coverage of Anna Nicole’s autopsy today, a peculiar news story squeezed in as filler. YouTube is posting videos, taken with cell phones by students, of teachers in public school classrooms having violent, abusive outbursts. I saw this on MSNBC while I was dusting blinds, and it stopped me in my tracks.

The most remarkable thing about it, aside from the extremely brief flashes of raging teachers smashing students’ phones on the floor, was what the news personality had to say about it. She wondered aloud if this meant schools should ban cell phones.

That was it.

Setting aside the issue of cell phones, there was not even a cursory mention of the behavior of the teachers — which was abusive as hell and showing students that the way to reassert control is to act like a raging asshole (links below). The physically violent teachers, by the way, were men.

So what the news personality, or her editor, or MSNBC decided to omit in its coverage of this story, established a baseline. Here are the issues this story raises, period… there are no others. That the students were being subjected to abuse was off the table.

This is the way the media pre-conforms us. They use their constructed authoritative position to establish what is axiomatic. Discourse that wiggles under the fence is automatically de-legitimated. How many times have we seen this with the war, with free trade agreements, with coverage of Venezuela, et al?

As it happens, the night prior, I had been by Internationalist Books at Chapel Hill to hear a too-brief talk by writer, cultural materialist, and intentional communitarian Alexis Zeigler. Alexis was talking about peak oil, the history of technology, ecology, and culture. One of his main points, and also a strong point in his book, Culture Change, is that the primary function of schools — as a public institution – is not to teach us to be smarter, but contrariwise to teach us how to conform and be obedient, productive worker bees.

Ivan Illich, who we have featured here as our first New Canon author, says much the same thing – which runs counter to a lot of left orthodoxy that sees fighting for public schools as a key step in establishing the workers’ paradise some fine day.

There are so many issues we could raise in violating this taboo against questioning school and schooling that one hardly knows where to begin. Begin with hierarchy imposed on children because of their dependency… the infantilization of women as part of combining dependency with obedience… the institutionalization and construction of knowledge… the similarities between schools and prisons… off we could go. And there are the complexities, like the fact that schools and universities and even ruling class institutions are also places where we can act out our subversions when we are in a position of inferior social power. There are subversive teachers, subversive schools, and universities have more than once transformed themselves into platforms of resistance (the reason tenure is under attack).

At any rate, I just had to remark on the delicious irony that consumer culture has foisted on us here… kids with cell phones have begun to use them as a weapon to defend themselves against the trainers and turnkeys for late capitalism in the United Consumers of Amerika.

Most of these videos are listed under Angry Teacher.

Posted by stan as News at 2:06 PM PST

It’s easy, if you’re willing to use the internet as a by-pass medium to get around the funders that control both parties.

All other things being the same, there are five issues you can emphasize that will get you enough of the independent and Democrat crossover vote to win in the General Elections in 2008, and enough Indies and Libertarians in the Primaries.

FULL DIRECTIONS FOR REPUBLICANS WHO WANT TO WIN

Posted by stan as News at 4:06 PM PST

Taking Cuba’s lead, Venezuela has distributed millions of fluorescent bulbs in recent months, giving a blue-gray glow at nighttime to slums that used to be swathed in common yellow incandescent light.

“We see the savings,” said Francis Izquierdo, a single mother in Caracas who said her power bill is about half what it was before the bulbs were replaced in her barrio.

Chavez also said recently that he will raise gasoline prices to encourage Venezuelans to drive less, although he hasn’t said by how much….

…Chavez said he also plans to open a solar energy research center to eventually produce solar panels “in massive quantities” to supplement hydroelectric dams and reduce the need for oil-fired power plants. It remains unclear when that project may begin.

LINK TO FORBES ARTICLE

Posted by stan as News at 8:39 AM PST

I have posted a Petition-Online for those who are interested: a pledge to abstain from voting for anyone who continues to approve funds for the war. If you agree with this, please give the url the widest circulation possible. The text is below, but I want to re-emphasize that signing requires going to the url itself.

Thanks in advance to those who sign and distribute. If this perchance reaches a Gladwellian tipping point, then it could be a fine warning shot across a few bows. Get it out. Get it viral.

To: U.S. Congress

Whereas: the U.S. military occupation of Iraq is a cruel and illegal occupation that has cost nearly 700,000 lives, shattered a viable society, and displaced more than a million people, and

Whereas: the occupation itself is the single greatest causative agent of inter-Iraqi violence, and

Whereas: the majority of Iraqis want an immediate end to the occupation, and

Whereas: the majority of Americans now want the U.S. out of Iraq, and

Whereas: the Executive Branch of the U.S. government has declared its intention to remain in Iraq, and

Whereas: the war will end when the Legislative Branch refuses to fund it,

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED:

We, the undersigned, pledge that we will abstain from voting in 2008 for any elected official or candidate who votes or declares her/his intention to vote to continue funding of the war, no matter the electoral consequences. The scale of this crime that is the war in Iraq and its urgency is such that it has become an issue that overrides all other issues, and we are pledging to become single-minded, single-issue voters on this matter.

Sincerely,

SIGN HERE

Posted by stan as News at 11:07 AM PST

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by BrianR as News at 5:00 PM PST

Hat tip to De for this one on school lunch programs… a very fertile ground for local politics (no pun intended)…

Even the most intractable pathology can disappear, sometimes relatively quickly. A sign above a water fountain proclaiming “no coloreds” would cause any American to flinch today. Just half a century ago throughout the South, such abominations formed a banal part of the built landscape.

I got to thinking about deep-rooted problems and rapid change a few days ago while talking with Ann Cooper, a former star chef who now proudly styles herself a “renegade lunch lady.”

FULL

Posted by stan as News at 5:32 PM PST

A Girl Like Me is a film by Kiri Davis, a young Black woman, that is one of the finest pieces of cultural criticism you may ever see. (7 minutes)

Theologian Ched Myers’ discusses The Parable of the Sower, showing us one theology of liberation. (1 hour, 48 minutes)

The Alameda Point Youth Collaborative is a redemptive account of how food praxis looks among inner city youth. (Part 1, 5 minutes)

Here is the link to James Minton’s rough cut of the film “Veterans’ Gulf March Documentary.” (1 hour, 20 minutes)

See our complete and growing list of AV links.

Posted by stan as News at 9:32 AM PST

From Aron Wisner, LocalFuture.org
Find other copies of this video and a transcript here.

Summary
The growth of oil production is slowing, forcing up oil and gasoline prices, firing inflation, driving unemployment, straining our global economy and threatening to collapse our entire system.

We are reaching Peak Oil and we need to prepare.

In a compact new 10 minute summary video, Aaron Wissner explains the details of Peak Oil: the evidence, the impacts and the solutions.

Other links in Video:
The Relocalization Network
The Community Solution
Order the film The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil

Hat tip to MySpace user Insurgency Now for sharing the above Google video.

Posted by BrianR as News at 12:25 PM PST

HIV positive children and their loved ones have few rights if they choose to battle with social work authorities in New York City.

Jacklyn Hoerger’s job was to treat children with HIV at a New York children’s home.

But nobody had told her that the drugs she was administering were experimental and highly toxic.

“We were told that if they were vomiting, if they lost their ability to walk, if they were having diarrhoea, if they were dying, then all of this was because of their HIV infection.”

In fact it was the drugs that were making the children ill and the children had been enrolled on the secret trials without their relatives’ or guardians’ knowledge.

Posted by stan as News at 3:27 PM PST

Hat tip to Brian… he found Slow Food. What is that? you may ask… so we’ll tell you. It is an international non-profit organization that has managed to build a network of “convivia” (we like this term) - local concentrations of food-praxis folk who are not only doing remarkable educational work; they are building their community sensually… by eating. While scrolling through their local web sites for Slow Food USA, we found picture after picture of organic, local feasts (for omivores, veggies, and vegans), and more recipes than you can shake a stick at. We’ve been talking about “food praxis” for a minute on this site, and there is no reason to re-invent the wheel. For $5 a month ($60 a year), one joins the international and then qualifies to join one of the 150 (!!!) US convivia. The one-time payment is tricky for low income folk, and that’s a downside. But the basic network is already there and growing. Slow Food is very consistent with what IA stands for with regard to (1) the body as the first and last instance of politics and (2) food being a lynchpin issue for any liberatory political project. Slow Food, by bieng a 501(c)(3) inside the US is limited on its political activity as Slow Food, but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a critical networking and practical education function. IA is not a non-profit (in fact we barely pay any bills), so what Slow Food cannot say… and do, we can. We will also note that Slow Food seems to enjoy a very large women’s leadership majority.

Let’s eat!

Posted by stan as News at 3:01 PM PST