WILLIAMMORGAN.NET

There are few things I am less qualified to discuss than a government bailout bill. I’ve tried to keep track of everything, but when the talk turns to Mortgage Backed Securities and other numbers games my eyes glaze over. But there are a few observations that stand out:

1. Like most problems in modern day America, the average citizen thinks it has nothing to do with him or her. Every poll shows that Americans are against a “Wall Street bailout,” and the evening news lets angry citizens rant against rich bankers. What we seem to forget is that the problem isn’t really caused by banks. It’s caused by our failure to pay our mortgages. If everyone in America paid on time then the securities would be worth their original value. So enough of the whining and placing the blame on others! Unless you’re sitting on a 5.3% fixed loan with at least 20% of your house paid off then you’re part of the problem.

2. It’s difficult to blame the banks for their mistakes. Yes, it was caused by greed, but that’s the purpose of a corporation. Usually the goal is to make incremental wealth, but at times great risks must be accepted for the chance of massive profits. And the entire idea of risking an old, reputable company’s existence on mortgage securities isn’t that strange. It’s no different than a small business owner knowing he needs to expand to survive, only to collapse when he gets in over his head. You can’t ask corporations to make decisions with the world’s economy as the primary consideration. If they’re that big and important, and their terrible decisions can cause such ripples, then the government should be involved in order to control excessive risktaking.

3. In the end, the economic crisis is a result of philosophical policy decisions more than chance and bad luck. We created a government that allowed massive companies to take risks without proper regulation. We knew they had the power to damage the economy yet we believed so much in free markets that we trusted the corporations to control themselves. These were purposely chosen policies, consistent with Conservative economic philosophies, and they led to the current situation. That isn’t to say that Liberal policies wouldn’t have also led to an economic disaster, but it wouldn’t be this disaster.

4. I truly feel sorry for people close to retirement. Many of them share much of the blame (since, in my opinion, most government policies over the last twenty years have involved the high-voter-turnout elderly using their power to borrow money from their grandchildren that they have no intention of returning), but it still must be difficult to watch your 401K make no progress over the course of two presidential terms.

5. It’s the first crisis in my lifetime that forced me to take a deep breath and say, “Okay, are we okay?” Reasonable house with easily affordable loan? Check. Low monthly auto payment? Check. Resistance to high gas prices? Check. No credit card debt? Check. Dependable job? Check. Especially with two kids it makes you question and interrogate your decisions.

Is it possible to see a grown man on a BMX bike and not assume he has been doing meth all night?

(Inspired by a near-miss on the way to work today.)

At this point in time is it really possible for any intelligent American to argue that George Bush is anything but the worst president of my lifetime?

(I’ve sincerely tried to avoid that conclusion for a long time but $700 billion goes a long way toward settling a debate.)

Update: I guess somebody disagrees.

This Administration deserves to be trusted because it has kept us safe from terrorist attack since 9/11, has fought and won two wars, has presided over eight years of economic growth, has appointed two stellar justices to the Supreme Court, and has even learned how to do Louisiana’s job of protecting that state from hurricanes. The day will come, and not before long, when Americans will wish that George Bush was still president.

Friday’s homecoming assembly was a debacle–amazingly hot for 82 degrees, a female flag football game that involved relentlessly repetitive “option” plays without passing as an option (thus leading to an endless run of three-yard losses), and a mini-rebellion by parched students trying to leave the stadium to get a drink. (I was oddly disappointed that the full student rebellion never materialized–’cause the me at seventeen wouldn’t have put up with that–but the students did win when The Man cancelled the assembly with fifteen minutes remaining and ordered everyone inside.)

The true heroes were two students–one I know well, one only slightly–who took their places among this year’s queen candidates. When their names were called, they proudly stood in front of a crowd of 2,200 students and teachers. Al least I think and hope they were proud: proud to be gay, proud to be an interrarcial couple, proud to be individuals at a time in life when it’s easy to fake individuality but difficult to maintain.

My politics range all over the spectrum, but in certain areas I’m unabashedly Liberal. (I don’t even think it should be called Liberal. Openminded or simply liberal would be more accurate.) I think every student has a right to attend school and be who he or she wants to be, so long as nobody is hurt and even if others are offended. I think every adult has the right to be left alone as long as the same requirements are met. This was a moment in my life when I thought, “We won!” I’m not gay, I’m not in an interracial marriage, I’m more than willing to judge the actions of others, but by “We” I mean those who meet kindness with tolerance.

It was a moment when I looked back at my life and realized how quickly the world can change. There can’t be many feelings more uplifting than that.

Update: I wasn’t going to mention names but since there’s a great article in the Tribune, check it out.

In an attempt to (1) make my students read more complex nonfiction, (2) make myself move away from the easy teaching of literature to 10th graders, an approach that requires minimal mental effort, and (3) a horror at the mindlessness of the 2008 election, I decided to start each week with a close reading and discussion of a current nonfiction article. I started off with “On Stupidity” by Thomas H. Benton from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The author argues that a combination of anti-intellectualism and technology-induced brain rewiring has led to a nation of shallow thinkers. I have trouble arguing against him, especially when I compare his conclusions with my own students. However, I do have two concerns. First, I’m not sure my generation was really that different. Part of the rant sounds like the typical “Oh, students these days…!” garbage. Second, what I don’t see is the slightest diminishing of intelligence. My students seem as intelligent as they ever were. They just have different capabilities and lack the ability to shine in the areas that we traditionally valued.

Good or bad? Depends on whether you think traditional skills–analysis, support, logic, evaluating multiple positions–were a strength or an outdated form of mental oppression. (72% of current voters certainly seem to place no value on any of these traits.)

In the end, I fully agree with the following traits described by Benton, but I’m not convinced that they were any better in my day.

• Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their “feelings” — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.
• Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student
• Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.
• Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.
• Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.
• Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)
• Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.
• Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).
• Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.
• Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while “needing” to receive very high grades.

I also agree with the following observation:

Worst of all, the prevalence of multi-tasking — of always being partly distracted, doing several things at once — has diminished the quality of our thought, reflection, self-expression, and even, surprisingly, our productivity.

I want to believe that the ability to multitask outweighs the sustained thought that they have lost, but I don’t think it has.

Finally, on a lighter note, two nice pieces of irony related to this assignment.

1. I printed the article but forgot to have the machine staple it. I set it on my desk with a note saying, “Take both sheets and staple them.” As I started my lesson, endless cries of “Wait, I only have the second sheet!” and “Are there supposed to be two sheets here” interrupted me. Nice. They failed to read the note and messed up the “On Stupidity” assignment. (In their defense, as one student pointed out, I was the one who forgot to get them stapled. Who’s laughing at whom?)

2. At the end of the reading, a good student proclaimed, “Man, that article was boring.” The perfect high school response, and a good example of my uncertainties with this article. It was the exact response Benton would have predicted, but it was also the exact response that I would have expressed in 1986.

Don’t…write…about…politics…Don’t…write…about…politics…Okay, only one comment. People are dying, families are losing their houses, unemployment is rising, and we’re pretending that a candidate called another candidate a “pig,” as though we’re back on the playground in 1976. What the hell is wrong with these people, our media, and the average American voter? It’s offensive and immoral.

Now better stuff. I’m reading The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally. Not a great book thus far–since much of it is old news to anyone interested in linguistics–but some of the newest animal research caught my attention (like studies that show dogs can count to three. Weird.). The other interesting tidbit discussed how language categories can influence thought. I’m a big fan of S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, and the connection between labels and thought fascinates me. (Example: Speakers of E-Prime, who believe froms of “to be” destroy thought because when you say “That man is…” you link the man and the trait too closely.) A study by Jonathan Schooler showed that if people saw a face and then were asked to describe it, they were less likely to recognize the face in a future lineup than those who didn’t process the face through language. As Kenneally says, “Writing ‘he had brown hair’ can impair later identification because ‘brown’ refers to a category and not a particular color.” The same system that allows us to process and organize massive amounts of knowledge forces us to simplify reality in order to make categories that fit.

Now I’ll carefully fit it back into politics. Those who think in terms of “Democrats always…” or “All Republicans think…” distort reality in order to simplify it. The act of categorization changes thought. Language isn’t responsible for the low state of American politics, but it certainly isn’t helping.

(I believe I lifted this post directly from 2003, so if you were with me then, or if you have been in the room with me much over the past two weeks, you’ve heard it all before. Sorry ’bout that.)

So much I could say about current politics (as Molly could attest) but I’ll keep it simple. The great scandal of this election season isn’t the comments made by politicians but the media’s inability to call a lie a lie. In most cases, I think blaming the media is the easy way out. We blame networks for showing us garbage, but they only check ratings and respond with what works, so we can only blame ourselves. We apparently want scandal and smut, easy to understand and digest, and so we get on-air commentators blocking the words of convention speakers with hours of mindless minutiae.

The single greatest calling of the media should be an obsession with the truth. Instead we get an obsession with the appearance of fairness. When a politician lies, the media has an obligation to call it a lie. Obviously there are many times when intelligent people can see things differently, and then they should look for fairness. But much of what we have heard recently has been dishonest. The media has an obligation to make dishonesty shameful, to make the punishment for falsity greater than the advantages. They need to lay into lies and liers.

Small example from the past: Al Gore’s invention of the internet. Not only did he not say this, the entire idea that he would make this claim is preposterous. Even if you believe that Gore had a tendancy to stretch the truth, you can’t honestly believe that he would take credit for a scientific invention that twelve seconds of research would prove false! The same people who chuckle at this garbage can’t honestly believe it’s true. Yet you hear it again and again, and it just rolls past the average reporter and becomes “truth.”

Thanks for wasting our time and cheapening politics in America, 24-hour news networks!

(Ok, self-righteous anger has subsided.)

Every once in a while I have to clear out the scraps of half-digested almost-posts that I have collected. Usually I read something interesting, e-mail it to myself, start a post, and then lose interest.  So here are a few that qualify as too good to lose yet not worthy of a full post:

1. I read an article about a British woman who was enjoying the excoriating pleasure of the English press. She released this wonderful tidbit:

Karen Matthews, who received welfare payments of $40,000 a year, had borne seven children to five different men. She called two of her children with the same father “the twins,” thus transferring the meaning of “twin” from the relatively unusual biological occurrence of double birth to what she clearly thought the equally unusual social circumstance of full siblinghood.

A beautiful example of language exposing culture.

2. I drove by a church that has this wonderful piece of enlightenment on the sign out front:

Don’t be so open-minded or your brain will fall out.

Be scared–very, very scared–when open-mindedness becomes a sin. (I get that they are perhaps discussing mindless open-mindedness, or the acceptance of any contrary opinion in the name of having an open mind, but that’s not what the quote says. As it is, it’s creepy.)

3. I read The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria and very quickly he included a quote that grabbed my attention. It’s by Harvard professor Steven Pinker, and here’s a longer version of it:

I’m going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong. That, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.

Interesting. It feels true in the gut. This isn’t to downplay the very real violence in the world, only to point out its unexpected rarity. Media saturation makes it look horrible, and it is devastating in some places, but as a percentage chance (i.e. your true chance of being affected by violence in the next year), it’s amazingly low. Example: In Columbia, which is in the middle of a “crime wave,” you will most likely avoid violence if (1) you’re over 25, (2) you don’t deal drugs, and (3) you stay away from abusive relationships.

Rarely do I read a book that completely changes the way I view the world. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus provided that uncommon feeling. The premise of the book seems straightforward: The Americas before Columbus were intensely cultivated and massively populated, and the sparse, scattered tribes encountered by later explorers were the remnants of civilizations destroyed by European diseases.

Now, I have absolutely no credientials for judging the accuracy of this book. For all I know this is a fringe argument that real archeologists scoff at. All I can do is read with a little skepticism and search through book reviews on Amazon and other sites for competing opinions. But it seems legitimate. The evidence is admittedly fragmentary but compelling and increasingly overwhelming.

The first thing that really surprised me was the advanced nature of multiple cultures in the Americas. Our high school students study Mesopotamia, Ancient China, India, and Egypt. They know of the Incas and the Mayas, but 1491 argues for lots of other civilizations that developed as early as these “Big Four.” We tend to think of the Americas as falling behind Europe, Asia, and Africa after they were cut off from those civilizations, but this book argues that they independently developed civilizations that were equally ancient and, at times, more advanced.

The second discovery–essential to the first–was the unique nature of corn. I never realized it was a genetically-engineered crop that depended entirely on humans to propogate itself. 1491 argues that Indians bred corn, spread it among their neighbors, and great civilizations naturally grew from the abundance of food.

Finally, the most important realization comes from the touched and cultivated state of the Americas over the previous thousands of years. As an environmentalist, my thinking is clouded by the view that nature was once pristine until altered by Europeans. This book provides lots of evidence that Indians intensely altered their environment. Example: Visitors are astounded that you can walk through the Amazon and find edible fruits and trees everywhere. 1491 argues that they are remnants of orchards–that Indians practiced forest agriculture and spread edible plants over thousands and thousands of acres. There’s nothing pristine about it.

Obviously Mann’s arguments are much more detailed and convincing than my summaries. This is the kind of book that soaks in and has unexpected consequences as it influences your thinking on many unrelated subjects. A true revelation.

The funny thing about being a world soccer fan is that you don’t have a natural team to support. Yeah, it’s possible to support a United States MLS team, but (1) they’re not the quality of other teams, (2) they don’t play in cool things like the Champions League, and (3) I’d have to root for Kansas City, the closest team to my house, and I don’t have it in me to violate my residual St. Louis snobbery for all things Kansas City. So most people end up choosing based on outdated politics (like Leftists for Barcelona or Right wingers for Real Madrid or AS Roma), jumping on a bandwagon, obsessing over a favorite player, supporting American players (like Dempsey and McBride for Fulham), or connecting to a team near a place they have visited (ridiculed nicely by Stuff White People Like). I happen to be a mix of all of these.

So while last year I went exlusively for Liverpool (because I really got hooked on soccer while watching their Champions League victory against A.C. Milan in 2005), this year I have refinded my shallow tastes and choose to support the following:

I’m rooting for Arsenal because I like their attempt to win using youth instead of purchasing talent, they’re owned in part by Columbia’s own Stan Kroenke (not that I have much good to say about him, but that’s a different post), both Arsene Winger and the players seem classy (and Wenger doesn’t whine all the time like Rafa Benitez), they play completely positive attacking soccer, which makes them fun to watch, and they have a cool logo. Negative #1 is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, #2 is that they don’t have a cool English name like Tottenham Hotspur, #3 is that they play in the ultramodern and boringly-named Emirites Stadium instead of a place with a cool name like Fratton Park, White Hart Lane, or Craven Cottege.

English Premier League team #2 is Portsmouth. Why two teams in one league? Becuase the EPL is so lopsided that you really need to cheer for one team at the top, one in the middle, and one that you hope to keep away from relegation. In other words, only five or six teams have the slightest chance of winning, so it’s fun to grab a middle-of-the-pack team, too. Portsmouth gets it because the Southern coast of England ranks as one of my favorite places, I really felt Peter Crouch was misused by Liverpool so I’ll follow him back to Portsmouth, and England needs teams to succeed that don’t come from Manchester or London.

In Spain I’ll go for Athletic Bilbao (since I love the Basque region and it’s cool to attempt to win with only native players), Sevilla (my favorite region in Spain, though the city isn’t top on my list), and Barcelona (only because you know it’s going to come down to Barcelona and Real Madrid, so you have to choose sides).

Shallow reasons, yes, but is it any worse than hoping Prince Fielder gets a home run for Milwaukee because he is on your fantasy baseball team? I think not.