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Thursday, March 20, 2014

“Coalfield Stockholm syndrome”: West Virginians say they’re still loyal to the coal industry

SALON





“Coalfield Stockholm syndrome”: West Virginians say they’re still loyal to the coal industry

 

Some people affected by the water crisis don't blame "King Coal" for causing it





 
 
Mining operations, Charleston, WV (Credit: Amanda Haddox/Shutterstock)
 
 
There are plenty of people West Virginians can choose to be angry at following the chemical leak that left 300,000 of them without tap water. The folks at Freedom Industries who delayed reporting the leak until they were pretty much forced to, and who waited even longer to mention that a second chemical may have leaked as well. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which hadn’t inspected the facility in 20 years. The legislators behind the loophole-filled legislation that allowed them to get away with this (something that’s beginning to be remedied with today’s introduction of the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act). The CDC for having no clue how dangerous the contaminated water actually was.

Oh yeah, and the coal industry, for whose benefit this chemical was being stored. But those guys are being let off the hook, reports Al Jazeera America – even in places where people were already not drinking tap water because of the industry’s paste misdeeds:
“This is just a freak accident with the water thing, in my opinion,” said Timothy McKinney, 30, a laid-off coal miner in Prenter, W.Va. “I’ve been in coal mining since I was out of high school, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the coal industry in general.”
Until a lawsuit against nearby coal mine companies two years ago, many Prenter residents had either drawn sulfurous-smelling water from wells or driven miles down the road to buy bottled water. The plaintiffs in the case said coal processing waste pumped underground by coal companies had seeped into their water supply, turning it a red or orange color and making it smell like rotten eggs.
After the suit, residents say, they received connections to the West Virginia American Water system. Yet on Jan. 9 they found out they couldn’t temporarily drink that either, due to the chemical spill.
Despite the accident, the decline of the coal industry — which McKinney blames on political factors — is what he believes is the region’s biggest long-term problem, not the poisoning of the water supply. His main wish for his state is a bigger, not smaller, coal industry, providing good jobs which are not curtailed by environmental regulations.
“I’m speaking for a thousand, fifteen hundred people that’s been laid off throughout West Virginia. There’s a lot of families that’s lost homes, families that’s been broken up over it,” McKinney said, speaking near a creek that emitted a strong odor of sulfur as a steady stream of large dump trucks from a nearby mine rumbled past.
To be sure, it’s a complex issue, in which a declining number of mining jobs has led some to take up cooking meth instead. But the picture Al Jazeera paints is of communities unaware that there are any other options:
“I call it Coalfield Stockholm syndrome, and it is on a mass scale,” said Dustin White, an activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, who is from Boone County himself.
“We are programmed early on,” said White, 30, who is also the son of a coal miner. “They (the industry) have ingrained themselves in every aspect of our lives.”
Lindsay Abrams Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

American Amnesia

Defining Ideas logo


July 1, 2011

American Amnesia

Young people in this country are failing civics, which is a crisis for the nation.




The New York Times headline from May could not have been more compelling: "Failing grades on civics exam called a 'crisis.'" The accompanying story reported bleak news from the latest National Assessment of Student Progress (widely known as the "nation's report card"). Among our present crop of high school seniors, only one in four scored at least "proficient" in knowledge of U. S. citizenship. Of all the academic subjects tested, civics and the closely linked subject of history came in last: "a smaller proportion of fourth and eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in civics than in any other subject the federal government has tested since 2005, except history, American students' worst subject."

Failing Liberty
Illustration by Barbara Kelley

Not surprisingly, the story drew appalled reactions from public figures such as Sandra Day O'Conner ("we have a crisis on our hands"). Charles Quigley, a civics educator, noted that "the results confirm an alarming and continuing trend that civics in America is on the decline." He declared that in the U.S. today, "civic education is facing a real 'civic recession.'" Yet within a week, despite the perception of crisis among those who were paying attention, the story vanished from sight. This may be the most alarming part of the crisis—our society's seeming lack of awareness of the grave threat that civic ignorance among our youth poses to the future of our democracy.

Perhaps this important story was largely ignored because it was not really news. For the past ten years or more, virtually every glimpse into American students' views on citizenship has revealed both a lack of understanding and a lack of interest. An American Enterprise Institute study earlier this year found that most social studies teachers doubted that their students grasped core U.S. citizenship concepts such as the Bill of Rights or the separation of powers. A recent Department of Education study found that only nine percent of U.S. high school students are able to cite reasons why it is important for citizens to participate in a democracy, and only six percent are able to identify reasons why having a constitution benefits a country. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has reported a decades-long, step-wise decline in interest in political affairs among college freshmen—from over 60 percent of the population in 1966 to less than half that percentage in our current period.

A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry.

For the past ten years, our research team at Stanford has interviewed broad cross-sections of American youth about what U. S. citizenship means to them. Here is one high school student's reply, not atypical: "We just had (American citizenship) the other day in history. I forget what it was." Another student told us that "being American is not really special….I don’t find being an American citizen very important." Another replied, "I don’t want to belong to any country. It just feels like you are obligated to this country. I don’t like the whole thing of citizen...I don’t like that whole thing. It’s like, citizen, no citizen; it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen...it’s stupid to me."

Such statements reflect more than an ignorance of citizenship—though they may provide us with clues about the source of students' present-day lack of knowledge. Beyond not knowing what U.S. citizenship entails, many young Americans today are not motivated to learn about how to become a fully engaged citizen of their country. They simply do not care about their status as American citizens. Notions such as civic virtue, civic duty, or devotion to their country mean little to them. This is not true of all young people today—there are exceptions in virtually every community—but it accurately describes a growing trend that encompasses a large portion of our younger generation.

This trend has not arisen in isolation. Indeed, the attitudes of many young Americans are closely aligned with intellectual positions that they likely have never encountered first-hand. In our leading intellectual and educational circles, the entire notion of national devotion is now in dispute. For example, in a book about the future of citizenship, a law professor recently wrote: "Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete …American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization." As a replacement for commitment to a nation-state, the author wrote, "loyalties…are moving to transnational communities defined by many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation." In similar fashion, many influential educators are turning to "cosmopolitanism" and "global citizenship" as the proper aim of civics instruction, de-emphasizing the attachment to any particular country such as the United States. As global citizens, it is argued, our primary identification should be with the humanity of the world, and our primary obligation should be to the universal ideals of human rights and justice. Devotion to one's own nation state, commonly referred to as patriotism, is suspect because it may turn into a militant chauvinism or a dangerous "my country right or wrong" perspective.
As one high school student put it, "...It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen...it’s stupid to me."

While the lofty ideals of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship are understandable, they do not in themselves provide a realistic route to civic education. For one thing, the serious tasks of citizenship that students need to learn are all played out on a local or national level rather than a global one. We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator; we do not serve in a world army or peace corps; and we are not called to jury duty in any world courtroom. When we write e-mails to our congressional representatives or vote and campaign for candidates running for elected office, these activities are part of our national civic life, not part of any global event. As philosopher Michael Walzer wrote, "I am not a citizen of the world…I am not even aware that there is a world such that one could be a citizen of."

To conduct our U.S. citizenship activities intelligently and responsibly, we must know how the American system operates; and we must care enough to make the effort to get involved. More than this, in times of national peril, we must care enough to sacrifice for the common good if needed. This requires more than civic knowledge: it demands devotion to a cause greater than ourselves. Over the course of American history, love of country has been the foremost motivator of such sacrifices for the greater good, in battles both against tyrannical forces abroad and social injustices domestically.

Discouraging young Americans from identifying with their country—and, indeed, from celebrating the traditional American quest for liberty and equal rights—is a sure way to remove their most powerful source of motivation to learn about U. S. citizenship. Why would a student exert any effort to master the rules of a system that the student has no respect for and no interest in being part of? To acquire civic knowledge as well as civic virtue, students need to care about their country.

It is especially odd to see schools with large immigrant populations neglect teaching students about American identity and the American tradition. Educational critic Diane Ravitch observed this phenomenon when visiting a New York City school whose principal proudly spoke of the school's efforts to celebrate the cultures of all the immigrant students. Ravitch writes, "I asked him whether the school did anything to encourage students to appreciate American culture, and he admitted with embarrassment that it did not."

These and other American students are being urged to identify with, on the one hand, customs from the native lands they have departed and, on the other hand, with the abstract ideals of an amorphous global culture. Lost in between these romantic affiliations is an identification with the nation where these students actually will practice citizenship. Adding to the dysfunction of this educational choice, as Ravitch writes, is the absurdity of teaching "a student whose family fled to this country from a tyrannical regime or from dire poverty to identify with that nation rather than with the one that gave the family refuge."

We are not "citizens of the world." We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator.

How can we do better? Of course we need to teach students the Constitution, along with its essential underlying principles such as separation of powers, representative government, and Federalism. Excellent programs for such teaching now exist. But these programs are not widely used amidst today's single-minded focus on basic skills. Compounding this neglect, the school assessments that drive the priorities of teachers infrequently test for civic knowledge. To preserve the American heritage of liberty and democracy for future generations, citizenship instruction must be placed front and center in U. S. classrooms rather than relegated to the margins.

As for the essential matter of motivation, the only way to capture students' interest is to inspire in them some justifiable pride in their country's best traditions. Fortunately, U. S. success stories are not hard to find. In our recent history, three 20th Century cases could be taught to promote pride in the American tradition: 1) the civil rights movement that extended rights to millions of citizens in the United States; 2) victories over totalitarianism (especially fascism, communism, and other militaristic tyrannies) that extended new freedoms to millions of subjugated people in Europe and Asia; and 3) the building of a middle class that offered economic freedom to millions of ordinary citizens, and to immigrants coming to American in search of a better life as well.

We live in a time marked by anxieties over many perceived threats to our way of life—terrorism, economic collapse, and climate change, to mention just a few of the widespread fears making our headlines these days. But there is a looming crisis closer at hand that poses every bit as grave a threat to the future of our way of life: the very real possibility that our democracy will be left in the hands of a citizenry unprepared to govern it and unwilling the make the sacrifices needed to preserve it. A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry. Failing this, as Ben Franklin long ago warned, despotism lies just around the corner.


William Damon is a professor of education at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For the past twenty-five years, Damon has written on character development at all stages of life. Damon's recent books include Failing Liberty 101 (Hoover Press, 2011); The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find their Calling in Life (2008); and The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing (2004). Damon was founding editor of New Direction for Child and Adolescent Development and is editor in chief of The Handbook of Child Psychology (1998 and 2006 editions). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Baby boomer humor’s big lie: “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack” really liberated Reagan and Wall Street

SALON



Baby boomer humor’s big lie: “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack” really liberated Reagan and Wall Street

Harold Ramis was a master of subversive comedy. But the politics of "Caddyshack" and rude gestures have backfired





 
Baby boomer humor's big lie:  
Ronald Reagan, ghostbusters (Credit: AP)


I am going to start with three beloved movies of my childhood, and end with a suggestion of why liberals will probably never be able to come to grips with what they winningly call “inequality.” The three movies I have in mind—”National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Caddyshack,” and “Ghostbusters”–were all written or directed, in whole or in part, by the great Harold Ramis, who died last week, and whose work was eulogized by President Obama as follows:
When we watched his movies . . . we didn’t just laugh until it hurt. We questioned authority. We identified with the outsider. We rooted for the underdog. And, through it all, we never lost our faith in happy endings.
That seems about right, doesn’t it? Each of the films I mentioned features some prudish or strait-laced patriarch who is spectacularly humiliated by a band of slobs or misfits or smart alecks. With their dick jokes and cruel insults, these movies represented, collectively, the righteous rising-up of a generation determined to get justice for the little guy. That’s why a group of prominent Democrats showed up at Ramis’ funeral. It’s why articles about Ramis’ movies routinely speak of their liberating power.

So, the political equation is obvious, right? We of the left own the imagery of subversion and outsiderness. It’s ours. Every time a stupid old white guy gets humiliated in a TV commercial for choosing Brand X, we know it’s because the people at Brand Y secretly support universal health insurance and a nice little pop in the minimum wage. Right?

Well, no. And with that acknowledgement, let me advance to my bold hypothesis: The dick joke is not always what it seems to be. The dick joke is not always your friend.

Start with the first really great movie Ramis had a hand in writing, “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation: the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty deals” to the naive and the credulous.

Drink, take and lie: translate it into Latin and it could be the motto of the One Percent. It is no coincidence that P. J. O’Rourke, who was editor of National Lampoon when “Animal House” was made and is currently a wisecracking critic of liberalism at the Cato Institute, recently declared that the release of the movie in 1978 marked the moment when his generation “took over” and started to make the world “better.” (That O’Rourke chose to write this for the American Association of Retired Persons is a particularly poignant detail.) It is also no coincidence that the fraternity at Dartmouth which served as one of the models for “Animal House” has of late become a kind of pipeline into the investment-banking industry, nor should it surprise anyone that Wall Street is home to a secret Animal House-style fraternity of its own, a place where the anarchic captains of finance come together to slurp likker and howl their admiration for their beau ideal: the self-maximizing asshole . . . who got bad grades in college.

The second of the Ramis comedies eulogized by Obama was the 1980 cult classic “Caddyshack,” which took on the great movie theme of the Seventies—class antagonism—over a game of golf. The martinet this time is a country-club grandee, depicted by veteran blowhard Ted Knight; the slob confronting him is a real-estate developer of hilariously garish taste played by Rodney Dangerfield; between them stands the American worker in all his nobility—meaning, specifically, a teenaged caddy at the country club who must decide whether to be true to his blue-collar self or to kiss the grandee’s ass in order to go to college. The movie unfolds as a series of set pieces in which WASP prigs blow gasket after gasket upon beholding some infringement of their Prussian sensibilities—absorbing one of Dangerfield’s jokes, or seeing caddies frolicking in the pool, or hearing someone using the word “sucks,” or finding a car parked on the lawn, or picking up the saucy strains of a Journey song as it wafts across the greensward. Boom: Apoplexy! Watch the patriarchs go berserk!

And that makes for a pretty liberal film, right? I mean, who else makes fun of country club grandees except for us lefty authority-questioners?

Well, free-market conservatives do. Google the phrase “Country club Republican” and what you will find, by and large, are right-wing types using it as a synonym for “RINO”: fake Republicans who are in it for the snobbery—not out of faith in the relentless, disruptive forces of capitalism.

These same conservatives are also the most likely to understand class conflict in the way “Caddyshack” does: as a rivalry between WASP old money and differently pedigreed new money. In fact, this is one of the themes of George Gilder’s 1981 book “Wealth and Poverty,” the manifesto of the “supply-side” revolution, and of countless wealth-celebrating books that followed. That’s why “Caddyshack” seems in retrospect like a piece of crypto-Reaganite social commentary. Rodney Dangerfield’s character, for example, is a clear symbol of the crude power of markets—proudly showing off one of his tasteless billboards and announcing that he only cares about the “snobatorium” country club because he wants to build condos there. The choice before the white, working-class caddy boils down to the Harvard-proud WASP snob and the earthy, joke-cracking businessman; the side he eventually chooses is the same one that millions of real-life blue-collar workers were also choosing in those confused days.

There is nothing “crypto” about Ramis’s 1984 hit, “Ghostbusters”: Its Reaganism is fully developed, as numerous critics have pointed out. Here the martinet is none other than a troublemaking EPA bureaucrat; the righteous, rule-breaking slobs are small businessmen—ghost-hunting businessmen, that is, who have launched themselves deliriously into the world of entrepreneurship. Eventually, after the buffoon from the EPA gets needlessly into the businessmen’s mix and blunders the world into catastrophe, the forces of order find they must outsource public safety itself to the hired ghost-guns because government can’t do the job on its own.

Both Reagan and his closest advisers were transfixed by the film, Sidney Blumenthal tells us; “Ghostbusters” fit nicely into their idea of an America guided by “fantasy and myth.” And while the film itself piled up its stupendous box-office returns in that summer of ‘84, Jack Abramoff and his College Republican pals got together a troupe of “Fritzbusters” to warm up the crowds at Republican events, mocking Democratic presidential candidate “Fritz” Mondale with an offensive take-off on the catchy “Ghostbusters” theme song. And why not? What Mondale was promising—yes, promising—was to raise taxes, balance the budget, get responsible, and close down the party. What a Niedermeyer.

Harold Ramis was a sort of poet of the rude gesture, of the symbolic humiliation. Our reaction to his work, both now and when it was fresh, is almost mechanical: We see the square on the screen get shamed, and our mind shouts liberation. It is almost Pavlovian. Our culture-masters have been gleefully triggering this kind of reaction for nearly fifty years now—since the rude gesture first became a national pastime during the 1960s—and in that time the affluent, middle-class society that produced the Boomer generation has pretty much gone the way of the family farmer.

These two developments are not unconnected. One small reason for the big economic change, I think, is the confusion engendered by the cultural change. The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.

Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee.

Thomas Frank's most recent book is "Pity the Billionaire." He is also the author of "One Market Under God" and the founding editor of "The Baffler" magazine.