Preference for myth

Tennessee teabaggers want to whitewash history by law.  They want to make sure that public school teachers cannot criticize the Founders:

"No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

These teabaggers want the myth they believed as naive children without all those messy non-white people.  They want hagiography unrelieved by any evidence at all that the Founders were human beings like us, that they made mistakes, that they politicked in ways often as hardball as we do.

This conflict is the central conflict of the culture war.  We believe in following the evidence where it leads.  They believe in suppressing any evidence that their beliefs are unsupportable - the pre-Enlightenment view.

(h/t Salon and Huffington Post)

High noon in home room

At the end of April, the Commercial Appeal ran an important report about guns in the Memphis public schools - 162 incidents over five years. Even with no fatalities and only a few actual woundings, this is a jaw-dropping number - close to one a week during the school year.

Six of the incidents happened at a school I once attended. One happened where my mother taught remedial reading many years ago, another where my father taught math even more years ago. Three guns were found at the high school that I could see from the dining room of the first house I really remember.

I have to wonder how many guns are not being found. Metal detectors only managed to find eight of the guns. Tips led to most of the confiscations. Many of the violating kids started as victims. How many gang members are too intimidating for anyone to rat on? How many of them carry a gun every day without the school system finding out?

What's the right way to make this better?

The NRA and its more rabid adherents will tell you that an armed society is a polite society. Oh, yeah, right. Like Baghdad. They will claim that the solution is to arm the teachers so that they can blow away the little miscreants.

High noon in home room, film at 11:00.

In fact, some of the kids are themselves enacting the NRA theory. They don't feel safe, so they arm themselves for self-defense. Of course, it's seldom that cut and dried; some of them, teetering on the brink of a life of crime, are defending themselves against violent consequences of their own acts.

I have no objection to more cops in the schools, especially those with large gang populations, and those cops have to be armed. They have to be more judicious than the cops who killed Sean Bell.

If metal detectors don't do much, is there a technology that could help? Sniffers for nitrogen compounds? They're way too expensive, but they might have fewer false positives than metal detectors. What about the airport machines that see through your clothes? Oh, yeah, imagine sending your daughter in to school every day for a high-tech strip search. Surveillance cameras? Aside from the fact that the schools probably have them already - Big Brother Jr. - I've never seen any security video outside of the movies that is more than slightly useful to find a gun before it's in flagrant use, when there's still something to do besides proving guilt.

What's left? The short answer is that I don't have a short answer. It's a hard problem.

Triage, first. One of the kids was only expelled after three offenses. I'm not interested in throwing away anyone - by forty, most of these kids will be through with crime, and the ones who are still alive will need education to succeed at all in work. But I'm most interested in preserving a chance to learn for the children who don't sling a gun into their book bags.

That's going to mean pulling juvy kids out into more secure schools. They can earn their way back to a normal schools by cleaning up.

But there are also liberal remedies that need to be applied to prevent the loss of youth. Kids need things to do, lots of them. I was appalled to learn that one of the kids who got caught in Memphis had found much less support from the community and government in New Orleans before Katrina washed it all away and sent him to Memphis as a refugee.

Conservatives love to lampoon midnight basketball, but you can't carry a gun on the court, and basketball doesn't cost much.

Originally published on TennViews.

Hey, man, something for your head?

I heard this in the Oakland, California, bus station nearly 30 years ago, but I didn't buy. Looks as though American farmers bought from their pusher, who, now that they're addicted to Roundup, is squeezing them on price.

By the way, most of the "economics" in the news story makes no sense at all. The most glaring example of bullshit from Monsanto executive Kevin Eblen:

We feel first and foremost that we have to cover the Roundup Ready acres with our product. The only real ability we had to do that -- with generics raising their prices -- was to follow with a big price increase of our own.

Chemical structure released into public domain on Wikimedia Commons. Accuracy not guaranteed!

How did they miss me?

I'm so white it would be a relief to find some ancestry from outside northern Europe. I'm a walking collection of recessive pigmentation traits. If I sit in the sun unprotected for a few seconds, I can get enough vitamin D for the whole day.

I'm a heterosexual man, fond of pretty women and sports, often at the same time. At age eight, I already knew I wanted to be a scientist (didn't happen, by the way), but a first career as that age's Tom Brady definitely appealed to me even then.

My parents taught me Protestant Christianity. It didn't take in the end, but they gave me what all parents at the time thought they should give.

I grew up in the South, Tennessee to be exact, a Democrat by birth, inheritor to that complicated and often sullied legacy.

In short, by demographics, I was the natural target of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to move Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, racism, regionalism, and conservativism intact.

How did the Republicans miss me?

In short, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ugly, callous Southern white men who killed Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who bombed those young girls in Birmingham, who viciously murdered Emmett Till, who clubbed or shot the Selma marchers, who stood in the schoolhouse door - those ugly, callous terrorists were my people, and my parents taught me to be ashamed of them by simply showing me their own shame.

In one way, my mom and dad were radicals. They believed in the power of words and ideas to change the world. They had learned this from their parents, who in their place and time had also been progressive on race, and so they passed it on to me.

King believed this, too, painfully, passionately, sacrificially. That a black man could come up in the American South of the Depression and WWII and Jim Crow and not become a violent revolutionary still fills me with awe and wonder. I could not have done it. But when I hear "I have a dream", I still tear up. Every time.



When King went to Memphis in 1968, he knew he was a target. He knew he might not live out the next day. Yet he was at peace.



He went as he must, as a lamb of God. He went because it still then was an issue whether the black men who carried away the garbage of Memphis were indeed men.

We should all remember that this was only forty years ago. While America has been much changed by his life and by his passing, there is much still to be done.

Lady liberty

Your hooded masses yearning to breathe free...

(Click on the image.)

Love the extended pinky, too.