Kerry will win by under 5 points. The election will be contested for two months. It won't have to go to the supreme court, but will be settled in a surprise ruling from the Federal District Court with authority over Wisconsin. The Republicans, shamed by news of their efforts to simply throw a monkey wrench into the election, will choose not to contest the outcome. Bush will disappear for a few months, then will come back into national attention in the Summer of 2005 when he serves as an informal diplomat with the Asian bloc for Kerry.
Kerry's first crisis will be a domestic problem with a major Southeast city on the verge of bankruptcy erupting in riots over housing. His adroit use of the National Guard will earn him some credibility with the disaffected right. Unemployment will continue to go up, and the first signs of a major scandal in the housing finance market will keep tensions high.
Iraq will not be the big issue everyone expects. Problems with Afghanistan and increased Palestenian problems will send Iraq into the background while Kerry tries to draw down the American presence there, and build up allies support. It will be discovered that the resistance in Iraq is coordinated through a tough, deep network of entrenched Baathists who actually had a plan for the eventuality of Hussein's capture and an American occupancy. By the end of the year, there will be a series of meetings between the Baathists and the occupiers, with a drift toward revising the history of the Baath party to make it possible for them to come back into power, sans Hussein.
A family or health crisis for Kerry in late Summer will bring Edwards into the national spotlight. Cheney's memoirs, published in late Fall, cause a sensation. Bush continues to stay in the limelight. Laura Bush starts a cable television show of her own, produced by Oprah Winfrey. It will be dedicated to the plight of American teachers, and will feature exceptional teachers, support for dynamic policy development, and lots of feel good clips about individuals who make a difference in catastrophic school systems.
14.10.04
Why all math teachers are French.
Well, they aren't. But the French have a reputation for being snobs, and it is said that they have little patience for outsiders speaking their language badly.
So there is a parallel. Most math students learn to expect a certain degree of impatience from even the most jovial of math teachers. And within the ranks of mathematicians, there seems to be a fierce pecking order that rewards the highest achievements, such as the Field Medal, with fawning obsequity, while bumbling performance in, say, factoring a third-order equation would insure scorn for the hapless exponent-juggler.
I am finally okay with this stratification after most of a life spent in envy of math. I didn't get any good math as a kid. But I wanted it. I would press my face against the glass store front of trigonometry and look at the shiny sines and cosines inside the way other kids hungered after candy or toys.
Now that I have decided to learn Calculus at the ripe old age of 56, however, I have made some observations about the teaching of this subject in college that I am forced, by my conscience and modesty, to share with everyone.
I am on the other end of the stick, as it were, struggling through some marvelously bad teaching in Calculus. The weird thing is that the teacher is "good" in almost every respect. He has a sense of humor and self deprecation, and when he is on, he is extremely fluent in the dialect of math called Calculus, without being overbearing.
The problem, I believe, is structural. Teaching calculus in American Universities is a culture that we inherit partly from the European model and partly from the United States home-grown methods devised to ramp up to a war in the last century. There is an odd mix of Imperial theory and Royal protocols associated with an equally rough and ready, rolled-up sleeves practicum which knocks the dainty and the insecure on their ass. I find it a particularly ugly hybrid. The upshot of the mass of skills and information they try to cram into short, crowded class sessions is too much emphasis on the student teaching themself in lengthy, arduous homework sessions. To further muddle the mix, the instructor doesn't establish any real working relationship with the class. You get a perfunctory "Well, any questions?" tossed to the glaze-eyed cohort before he proceeds to erase the brambles of equations and start a new forced march into Symbolville.
Then the test is administered, and it is sadistic. Instead of providing a foundation set of questions to assess the student's basic grasp of the main principles, every single one of the questions pivots on extremely difficult, obscure, multiple encrustrations of operators operating on operators with similar but different effects. In a class of 30,3 people finished half an hour before the 2 hour session was up, and over half were still writing and erasing when the class was over.
I understand the ideas behind this kind of presentation. It seems like an efficient way to cover the sheer quantity of material that needs to be presented. In the whole semester we barely cover the substance of 4 chapters in a book with some 20 chapters, while touching on high points of about 3 others.
But does it really cover the material? And is there really that much material?
It doesn't "cover the material" if 80% of the class gets 70% or less of the material, with 30% of the class getting 40% or less of the material. Only one or two individuals achieve true mastery, and they usually come into this with some background or skills lacking in the other students, something like a parent who teaches or practices in the field, or a great high school experience.
In the military, this might be okay, with each class only needing to provide the engineers with a few highly competent individuals while the rest are diverted into more maintenance and support roles.
If I was a business owner paying to have my staff skills upgraded, I would fire the company that used this teaching method and sue them for fraud.
There is no reason that 100% of the students can't master 100% of the fundamentals, and 100% of the main ideas in the subject.
It would require a major overhaul of the class structure, but it could be done with the available personel and scheduling.
My proposal is as follows:
The first two weeks is exclusively devoted to assessment and drill in fundamentals. No one should go to the first rung of calculus without a complete grasp of logarithm, exponenst, functions, trigonometry, etc. Anyone who can't get up to speed in two weeks of the class should be diverted to the appropriate pre-calculus, or algebra class no matter what their transcript says.
From two weeks on, the class should be arranged so that every student has a drill partnership responsible for their mastering each theorem, law, rule, principle, basic equation, etc with flash cards. Drill partners would have the option of changing their partners the first week to accomodate major personality clashes, etc.
Every class period would have a time for drill/warm up, a time for lecture demonstration, and a time for student demonstration. The drill/warmups could be given the first 15 minutes while papers were handed out and business was taken care of by the instructor. Student demonstrations would involve rotating teams demonstrating homework problems on the board alternating with challenge questions from the instructor that were designed to stimulate, not humiliate, the students. The last half of the class could be lectures.
There should be homework which applies to the lectures done before the lecture, and turned in at the beginning of the next class period. This would make sure the questions, pace and focus of the lectures met the needs of the class, and it would ensure the class did the appropriate amount of work in a timely fashion...with the chance to correct and expand on problem areas in a non-punitive manner.
If people were unable or unwilling to perform to this degree of support, they should be excused from further involvement without penalty.
As it is, you are suckered into a semester of unknown difficulty, with all tuition due whether you drop the class or not, before the first test is given. You are dragged behind an unresponsive vehicle of instruction whose pace and capacity is set by the curriculum committee, not the actual capacity of the students themselves. And in doing this, the committees who are so absent from the classroom almost guarentee the emnity of the real students in the classroom. Or a substantial fraction of the them.
My plan elimnates some of the logjams and disconnects between understanding, demonstration, and performance. Ultimately math, like a language, is a matter of performance, not of simple matching or recognition skills. And like language, it is best learned speaking among natives in a congenial setting, with a fair sense of cause and effect, action and consequence.
The mystique of Royal Academy snobbishness and the crude efficacy of G.I. training clash in our classrooms of higher math. In the meantime, there is a dramatic need for an informed citizenship who can tackle the increasing demands of a technical culture with some confidence and math skills.
My plan addresses this need.
Vote for me.
So there is a parallel. Most math students learn to expect a certain degree of impatience from even the most jovial of math teachers. And within the ranks of mathematicians, there seems to be a fierce pecking order that rewards the highest achievements, such as the Field Medal, with fawning obsequity, while bumbling performance in, say, factoring a third-order equation would insure scorn for the hapless exponent-juggler.
I am finally okay with this stratification after most of a life spent in envy of math. I didn't get any good math as a kid. But I wanted it. I would press my face against the glass store front of trigonometry and look at the shiny sines and cosines inside the way other kids hungered after candy or toys.
Now that I have decided to learn Calculus at the ripe old age of 56, however, I have made some observations about the teaching of this subject in college that I am forced, by my conscience and modesty, to share with everyone.
I am on the other end of the stick, as it were, struggling through some marvelously bad teaching in Calculus. The weird thing is that the teacher is "good" in almost every respect. He has a sense of humor and self deprecation, and when he is on, he is extremely fluent in the dialect of math called Calculus, without being overbearing.
The problem, I believe, is structural. Teaching calculus in American Universities is a culture that we inherit partly from the European model and partly from the United States home-grown methods devised to ramp up to a war in the last century. There is an odd mix of Imperial theory and Royal protocols associated with an equally rough and ready, rolled-up sleeves practicum which knocks the dainty and the insecure on their ass. I find it a particularly ugly hybrid. The upshot of the mass of skills and information they try to cram into short, crowded class sessions is too much emphasis on the student teaching themself in lengthy, arduous homework sessions. To further muddle the mix, the instructor doesn't establish any real working relationship with the class. You get a perfunctory "Well, any questions?" tossed to the glaze-eyed cohort before he proceeds to erase the brambles of equations and start a new forced march into Symbolville.
Then the test is administered, and it is sadistic. Instead of providing a foundation set of questions to assess the student's basic grasp of the main principles, every single one of the questions pivots on extremely difficult, obscure, multiple encrustrations of operators operating on operators with similar but different effects. In a class of 30,3 people finished half an hour before the 2 hour session was up, and over half were still writing and erasing when the class was over.
I understand the ideas behind this kind of presentation. It seems like an efficient way to cover the sheer quantity of material that needs to be presented. In the whole semester we barely cover the substance of 4 chapters in a book with some 20 chapters, while touching on high points of about 3 others.
But does it really cover the material? And is there really that much material?
It doesn't "cover the material" if 80% of the class gets 70% or less of the material, with 30% of the class getting 40% or less of the material. Only one or two individuals achieve true mastery, and they usually come into this with some background or skills lacking in the other students, something like a parent who teaches or practices in the field, or a great high school experience.
In the military, this might be okay, with each class only needing to provide the engineers with a few highly competent individuals while the rest are diverted into more maintenance and support roles.
If I was a business owner paying to have my staff skills upgraded, I would fire the company that used this teaching method and sue them for fraud.
There is no reason that 100% of the students can't master 100% of the fundamentals, and 100% of the main ideas in the subject.
It would require a major overhaul of the class structure, but it could be done with the available personel and scheduling.
My proposal is as follows:
The first two weeks is exclusively devoted to assessment and drill in fundamentals. No one should go to the first rung of calculus without a complete grasp of logarithm, exponenst, functions, trigonometry, etc. Anyone who can't get up to speed in two weeks of the class should be diverted to the appropriate pre-calculus, or algebra class no matter what their transcript says.
From two weeks on, the class should be arranged so that every student has a drill partnership responsible for their mastering each theorem, law, rule, principle, basic equation, etc with flash cards. Drill partners would have the option of changing their partners the first week to accomodate major personality clashes, etc.
Every class period would have a time for drill/warm up, a time for lecture demonstration, and a time for student demonstration. The drill/warmups could be given the first 15 minutes while papers were handed out and business was taken care of by the instructor. Student demonstrations would involve rotating teams demonstrating homework problems on the board alternating with challenge questions from the instructor that were designed to stimulate, not humiliate, the students. The last half of the class could be lectures.
There should be homework which applies to the lectures done before the lecture, and turned in at the beginning of the next class period. This would make sure the questions, pace and focus of the lectures met the needs of the class, and it would ensure the class did the appropriate amount of work in a timely fashion...with the chance to correct and expand on problem areas in a non-punitive manner.
If people were unable or unwilling to perform to this degree of support, they should be excused from further involvement without penalty.
As it is, you are suckered into a semester of unknown difficulty, with all tuition due whether you drop the class or not, before the first test is given. You are dragged behind an unresponsive vehicle of instruction whose pace and capacity is set by the curriculum committee, not the actual capacity of the students themselves. And in doing this, the committees who are so absent from the classroom almost guarentee the emnity of the real students in the classroom. Or a substantial fraction of the them.
My plan elimnates some of the logjams and disconnects between understanding, demonstration, and performance. Ultimately math, like a language, is a matter of performance, not of simple matching or recognition skills. And like language, it is best learned speaking among natives in a congenial setting, with a fair sense of cause and effect, action and consequence.
The mystique of Royal Academy snobbishness and the crude efficacy of G.I. training clash in our classrooms of higher math. In the meantime, there is a dramatic need for an informed citizenship who can tackle the increasing demands of a technical culture with some confidence and math skills.
My plan addresses this need.
Vote for me.
Last AND least: the final debate, then beyond.
Kerry and Bush almost hugged last night.
They both got laughs at their own expense in reference to the assets of their wives.
Neither one of them were capable of presenting a picture of the current state of the United States that really included the darks and lights of the moment in which we live.
Kerry seems to have given up on nailing Bush to the wall. His recitation of the facts of "95% of cargo containers coming into this country don't get inspected" etc was in fact a litany of complaints. I don't know where Bush got that line but it was uncomfortably spot on. Actually, Bush said "A plan is not a litany of complaints."
Bush started out balanced and strong. He rarely sank to his bafflegab wandering hoo-ha that has characterized key moments of every public speech in his administration. Bush was still preaching to the choir, however. He made no effort to liberalize his message in the hopes of swiping a few more undecided votes into his column. He seemed to be making an heroic effort to raise the level of discourse by referring to Kerry as "The Senator from Massachussets" instead of the "Weasel Waffle Dispensing Obsessive Spender", and Kerry only called Bush a damn liar maybe twice.
Kerry should have been a lot better about domestic issues. He couldn't paint a clear picture of what he would do, however. It seemed as though the hard jabs from the right over the last few weeks have weakened him, but it might be that he really doesn't know what he would do if he had the reins of the country. He is good at spewing out the shortcomings of the Bush administration, and they are legion, and need to be taken more seriously. But when it came to explaining what exactly he would do for the schools, the hospitals, the unemployed, nothing really stood out as a new or workable alternative.
Kerry stayed too close to his point of the 87 billion dollar tax cut to the rich, as though that in itself was a skyhook which would lift him to victory. Bush refused to be baited, and continually reassured his believers that he wasn't an idiot or bumbling moron. That is all the reassurance they need, apparently.
Bush is not a bad guy. I sensed that early on, even when I felt the outcome of the Florida debacle was a national nightmare. Kerry is probably one of the most decent and courageous men we could have for a president from among all the candidates in the last hundred years. But he seems to be missing a gear when it comes to economics. He leans too hard on the taxes, doesn't seem to really understand the national bloodbath that occured with the dotcom crisis.
Both candidates are preening in the rear view mirror. And they probably are addressing an electorate that doesn't know how to look even a few months ahead,much less several years. We don't have any voices in this country that are trying to figure out what the hell is really going on.
The wound in Iraq is festering and infecting a lot of other areas. It threatens global equilibrium. The Islamists are not going to topple the major regimes in the world, but the Muslim unrest and reaction to Iraq contibutes to the teetering of dozens of regimes, and makes it more likely that other conflicts and problems will surface more quickly. That is a major problem that neither Kerry nor Bush are dealing with.
The devastation in Florida from the hurricanes revealed the shortcomings of our national emergency relief systems, and the vulnerability of our cities and regions to sustained disruption. Instead of bringing that forward, the disasters were kept off the front page and forgotten as soon as half the insurance claims had been filed.
Homeland security has gone from a novelty to a decadent morass of political infighting without going through a mature, productive phase. It is another porkbarrel.
The school systems are collapsing. They aren't just in trouble. They are falling down and crushing people in their ruins. They will not be fixed tomorrow with a band-aid today. Bush seems to think that by cheerleading for the idea of education he is actually doing something. Kerry doesn't have any insights into the problem. The culture of teaching in our country has received blow after blow from the demands created by budget shortfalls; from laws protecting the expensive and difficult to teach; and a generally hostile and leaderless community at odds with itself along racial and gender lines.
There is no leadership in this country for education, health, the military, community infrastructures, national emergency readiness. There is no leadership in this country that can heal the street-level conflicts of diversity and poverty.
Without that leadership, we are in a pot coming to a boil. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs it.
In my last post I said elect KerryBush: the Yalie. I was slightly amused by that. Today I am not amused.
Today I respect the men who talked earnestly and at length about our country last night. They showed that they respect each other and the voters of this country. And they showed that the political leadership in this nation has reached the brink of insolvency when it comes to real ideas about what is wrong, what is right, and what to do.
Complexity is overtaking our bromides and stereotypes. The intransigence of the world itself is pulling the pulling the tablecloth out from under our meal of middle class hash.
But you know what? I am not that pessimistic. Sure, I don't think the guys running for President can deliver anything they promise. Bush won't win the war or peace in Iraq. If he is reelected, he will ride the shambles of the war to defeat in a few years, and pull all our forces out with even less grace than the retreat from Viet Nam. If Kerry wins, the inner city schools and the economy will provide their own scenario of domestic reality, a scenario with no room for Kerry's edits. If he is a quick enough study he might be able to improvise fast enough to prevent riots and insurrections, and the complete melt down of whole regions.
But I am not that pessimistic.
In the early 19th century cities around the world started to explode in slow motion from the steroid-like growth of industrialization. Manchester England ballooned from 30,000 to close to 400,000 people in 40 years. Minneapolis Minnesota grew from 17,000 to close to 300,000 people in 30 years. We can't imagine the mayhem this caused for millions of people. In 1917 the influenza epidemic wiped out over 20,000,000 people in the world. Even as I write that number I can't believe it.
Humanity has survived unbelievable disruptions of "the ordinary." Some philosophers might assert that there is no such thing as ordinary life, or ordinary people, (Judith Guest's irony noted here).
In the few weeks I have been back in school studying the subect of cities, it has finally gotten through to me that human complexity is, finally, self-healing. All the plans and promises of all the leaders in history amount to a few pages of footnotes against the massive encyclopedia of fixes and work arounds the common people of the world have devised. And often enough they have devised these fixes to fix the shambles of some leader's plan.
Humanity has shown an unlimited appetite for growth, and a rage for chaos that defeats faith and order over and over again.
Even greater than these forces, however, is the force for healing. We are born ready to be injured and recover. We are educated being wounded and insulted, but absorbing the injury. Bones knit. Skin grows back. There are scars, but there is healing. There is fear, and sometimes holes in our hearts that can never be filled again.
But we do heal. Families heal or spin off and become new and fall and get up again. Children remind us that healing is the first principle of life, not a commodity on the market of the health industry.
Today I am cut and bleed. Tomorrow I am reaching out my hand to the same knife or kitten claws that betrayed me today.
We heal. Complexity heals itself. We are complex, and there are forces at work in our society beyond the knowledge of any school or political party. There is darkness in the human day and something shines in the human night.
You may take away my freedom. You may take away my illusions. But you can't tax or imprison my ability to heal.
I respect both candidates, with a growing sense of detachment. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs the pot as it comes to a boil. I know that we are born to err, and that everyone who dies has spent more time healing than dying, more time repairing things than breaking them, more time active in hope than paralyzed in the grip of hopelessness.
Where is the party of healing? They will get my vote.
They both got laughs at their own expense in reference to the assets of their wives.
Neither one of them were capable of presenting a picture of the current state of the United States that really included the darks and lights of the moment in which we live.
Kerry seems to have given up on nailing Bush to the wall. His recitation of the facts of "95% of cargo containers coming into this country don't get inspected" etc was in fact a litany of complaints. I don't know where Bush got that line but it was uncomfortably spot on. Actually, Bush said "A plan is not a litany of complaints."
Bush started out balanced and strong. He rarely sank to his bafflegab wandering hoo-ha that has characterized key moments of every public speech in his administration. Bush was still preaching to the choir, however. He made no effort to liberalize his message in the hopes of swiping a few more undecided votes into his column. He seemed to be making an heroic effort to raise the level of discourse by referring to Kerry as "The Senator from Massachussets" instead of the "Weasel Waffle Dispensing Obsessive Spender", and Kerry only called Bush a damn liar maybe twice.
Kerry should have been a lot better about domestic issues. He couldn't paint a clear picture of what he would do, however. It seemed as though the hard jabs from the right over the last few weeks have weakened him, but it might be that he really doesn't know what he would do if he had the reins of the country. He is good at spewing out the shortcomings of the Bush administration, and they are legion, and need to be taken more seriously. But when it came to explaining what exactly he would do for the schools, the hospitals, the unemployed, nothing really stood out as a new or workable alternative.
Kerry stayed too close to his point of the 87 billion dollar tax cut to the rich, as though that in itself was a skyhook which would lift him to victory. Bush refused to be baited, and continually reassured his believers that he wasn't an idiot or bumbling moron. That is all the reassurance they need, apparently.
Bush is not a bad guy. I sensed that early on, even when I felt the outcome of the Florida debacle was a national nightmare. Kerry is probably one of the most decent and courageous men we could have for a president from among all the candidates in the last hundred years. But he seems to be missing a gear when it comes to economics. He leans too hard on the taxes, doesn't seem to really understand the national bloodbath that occured with the dotcom crisis.
Both candidates are preening in the rear view mirror. And they probably are addressing an electorate that doesn't know how to look even a few months ahead,much less several years. We don't have any voices in this country that are trying to figure out what the hell is really going on.
The wound in Iraq is festering and infecting a lot of other areas. It threatens global equilibrium. The Islamists are not going to topple the major regimes in the world, but the Muslim unrest and reaction to Iraq contibutes to the teetering of dozens of regimes, and makes it more likely that other conflicts and problems will surface more quickly. That is a major problem that neither Kerry nor Bush are dealing with.
The devastation in Florida from the hurricanes revealed the shortcomings of our national emergency relief systems, and the vulnerability of our cities and regions to sustained disruption. Instead of bringing that forward, the disasters were kept off the front page and forgotten as soon as half the insurance claims had been filed.
Homeland security has gone from a novelty to a decadent morass of political infighting without going through a mature, productive phase. It is another porkbarrel.
The school systems are collapsing. They aren't just in trouble. They are falling down and crushing people in their ruins. They will not be fixed tomorrow with a band-aid today. Bush seems to think that by cheerleading for the idea of education he is actually doing something. Kerry doesn't have any insights into the problem. The culture of teaching in our country has received blow after blow from the demands created by budget shortfalls; from laws protecting the expensive and difficult to teach; and a generally hostile and leaderless community at odds with itself along racial and gender lines.
There is no leadership in this country for education, health, the military, community infrastructures, national emergency readiness. There is no leadership in this country that can heal the street-level conflicts of diversity and poverty.
Without that leadership, we are in a pot coming to a boil. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs it.
In my last post I said elect KerryBush: the Yalie. I was slightly amused by that. Today I am not amused.
Today I respect the men who talked earnestly and at length about our country last night. They showed that they respect each other and the voters of this country. And they showed that the political leadership in this nation has reached the brink of insolvency when it comes to real ideas about what is wrong, what is right, and what to do.
Complexity is overtaking our bromides and stereotypes. The intransigence of the world itself is pulling the pulling the tablecloth out from under our meal of middle class hash.
But you know what? I am not that pessimistic. Sure, I don't think the guys running for President can deliver anything they promise. Bush won't win the war or peace in Iraq. If he is reelected, he will ride the shambles of the war to defeat in a few years, and pull all our forces out with even less grace than the retreat from Viet Nam. If Kerry wins, the inner city schools and the economy will provide their own scenario of domestic reality, a scenario with no room for Kerry's edits. If he is a quick enough study he might be able to improvise fast enough to prevent riots and insurrections, and the complete melt down of whole regions.
But I am not that pessimistic.
In the early 19th century cities around the world started to explode in slow motion from the steroid-like growth of industrialization. Manchester England ballooned from 30,000 to close to 400,000 people in 40 years. Minneapolis Minnesota grew from 17,000 to close to 300,000 people in 30 years. We can't imagine the mayhem this caused for millions of people. In 1917 the influenza epidemic wiped out over 20,000,000 people in the world. Even as I write that number I can't believe it.
Humanity has survived unbelievable disruptions of "the ordinary." Some philosophers might assert that there is no such thing as ordinary life, or ordinary people, (Judith Guest's irony noted here).
In the few weeks I have been back in school studying the subect of cities, it has finally gotten through to me that human complexity is, finally, self-healing. All the plans and promises of all the leaders in history amount to a few pages of footnotes against the massive encyclopedia of fixes and work arounds the common people of the world have devised. And often enough they have devised these fixes to fix the shambles of some leader's plan.
Humanity has shown an unlimited appetite for growth, and a rage for chaos that defeats faith and order over and over again.
Even greater than these forces, however, is the force for healing. We are born ready to be injured and recover. We are educated being wounded and insulted, but absorbing the injury. Bones knit. Skin grows back. There are scars, but there is healing. There is fear, and sometimes holes in our hearts that can never be filled again.
But we do heal. Families heal or spin off and become new and fall and get up again. Children remind us that healing is the first principle of life, not a commodity on the market of the health industry.
Today I am cut and bleed. Tomorrow I am reaching out my hand to the same knife or kitten claws that betrayed me today.
We heal. Complexity heals itself. We are complex, and there are forces at work in our society beyond the knowledge of any school or political party. There is darkness in the human day and something shines in the human night.
You may take away my freedom. You may take away my illusions. But you can't tax or imprison my ability to heal.
I respect both candidates, with a growing sense of detachment. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs the pot as it comes to a boil. I know that we are born to err, and that everyone who dies has spent more time healing than dying, more time repairing things than breaking them, more time active in hope than paralyzed in the grip of hopelessness.
Where is the party of healing? They will get my vote.
12.10.04
The remains of the daydream: the second debate
Sara and I snuggled down on the couch in the basement with popcorn and snacks, as though this was our Friday night movie cocoon date. After the first twenty minutes of watching Bush act as though his animal tranquilizer dosage had been doubled, I wanted to get up and go clip my nails or something.
Bush was aroused. It was primary arousal, not the b-team wariness and snarkiness he sent in to represent him at the first debate.
Kerry was firmer than usual, confrontational, and succinct.
As I watched both men sustain a level of verbal jousting that never quite achieved inspiration or mayhem, I was reminded of my most boring marital spats. Yadda Yadda.
And then I realized this was the prime time pilot for the most daring mainstream programming yet: a gay guy becomes president, and the first lady is a guy...and they argue all the time. Except sometimes they make fun of each other, or reminisce about the good old days in college. They come close to embracing, then rip into another face-off, name calling, lachymose apostrophes to old loves and what could have been. What could your mother have done to make you like this? Why do you still try to prove yourself to your father? Why can't you care about me? Why don't you love me anymore?
BushKerry is one persona speaking from two different sides of the head. There is no news here. There is no real escape from the escalating systems of self-indulgence and self-destruction that are undermining our country. There is no future here.
The future waits in the wings, watching the Punch and Judy show. The puppets wear each other's ties as a sign of devotion.
The future waits in the wings, spoiling. It is a man in a suit covered with fishhooks, and each hook dangles a mackeral, and they are rotting. The future is a city with no working sewers. The future is a candybar wrapper in the fist of a child who has starved to death.
"Why do you spend all your weekends playing paintball with those guys!"
"First you said you wanted me to get implants. Then you said you didn't. Then you said you did. Make up your damn mind!"
Boo hoo hoo.
It isn't Bush and Kerry's fault that their presentation to the nation is reduced to fractured fortune cookie invective and 15-second spot ad copy promises. It isn't our fault that we have surrendered the only hope the world had of seeing a democracy grow wise as it grew older.
There are too many transitions going on all at once. We are emerging from the chaos of the Industrial and Urban revolutions. We are staggering under the distraction of the Information explosion. We have all become wired and bankrupt, frantic with the will to score while hating our own games.
I want a leader who will tell me to sit down and shut up. And then follow his own advice. I want a leader who will send the neighbors away for a while while he cleans up his own messy house. I want a leader who can hear his own voice, who has a sense of modesty about his own capacity. Leaders like that don't make it through the play-offs.
I wonder how Dean would have done in a debate with Bush. He would have broken Bush's rhythym, never played to his meanness, raised the ante intellectually over and over until Bush's straw stuffing burst out of his suit and set the stage ablaze with shame.
Kerry and Bush should rule the country together. The Two Headed Yalie. They are Better than You, and they Know the Strings to Pull. Vote Yale for President...what other choice is there?
Bush was aroused. It was primary arousal, not the b-team wariness and snarkiness he sent in to represent him at the first debate.
Kerry was firmer than usual, confrontational, and succinct.
As I watched both men sustain a level of verbal jousting that never quite achieved inspiration or mayhem, I was reminded of my most boring marital spats. Yadda Yadda.
And then I realized this was the prime time pilot for the most daring mainstream programming yet: a gay guy becomes president, and the first lady is a guy...and they argue all the time. Except sometimes they make fun of each other, or reminisce about the good old days in college. They come close to embracing, then rip into another face-off, name calling, lachymose apostrophes to old loves and what could have been. What could your mother have done to make you like this? Why do you still try to prove yourself to your father? Why can't you care about me? Why don't you love me anymore?
BushKerry is one persona speaking from two different sides of the head. There is no news here. There is no real escape from the escalating systems of self-indulgence and self-destruction that are undermining our country. There is no future here.
The future waits in the wings, watching the Punch and Judy show. The puppets wear each other's ties as a sign of devotion.
The future waits in the wings, spoiling. It is a man in a suit covered with fishhooks, and each hook dangles a mackeral, and they are rotting. The future is a city with no working sewers. The future is a candybar wrapper in the fist of a child who has starved to death.
"Why do you spend all your weekends playing paintball with those guys!"
"First you said you wanted me to get implants. Then you said you didn't. Then you said you did. Make up your damn mind!"
Boo hoo hoo.
It isn't Bush and Kerry's fault that their presentation to the nation is reduced to fractured fortune cookie invective and 15-second spot ad copy promises. It isn't our fault that we have surrendered the only hope the world had of seeing a democracy grow wise as it grew older.
There are too many transitions going on all at once. We are emerging from the chaos of the Industrial and Urban revolutions. We are staggering under the distraction of the Information explosion. We have all become wired and bankrupt, frantic with the will to score while hating our own games.
I want a leader who will tell me to sit down and shut up. And then follow his own advice. I want a leader who will send the neighbors away for a while while he cleans up his own messy house. I want a leader who can hear his own voice, who has a sense of modesty about his own capacity. Leaders like that don't make it through the play-offs.
I wonder how Dean would have done in a debate with Bush. He would have broken Bush's rhythym, never played to his meanness, raised the ante intellectually over and over until Bush's straw stuffing burst out of his suit and set the stage ablaze with shame.
Kerry and Bush should rule the country together. The Two Headed Yalie. They are Better than You, and they Know the Strings to Pull. Vote Yale for President...what other choice is there?
6.10.04
Sunlight and Moonlight on the National Stage
Most early societies identified solar and lunar influences on personality, society, and the world at large. In watching the Vice-Presidential candidate debate last night, I thought about this aspect of the election.
Solar influences are clearly defined, solid, forthright. They are based on courageous actions undertaken for simple clear outcomes. The sun is active, energetic, supports growth and health. At an extreme, the Solar influences become "too much of a good thing"; i.e. too much aggresion, too much simplification, too much heat. The solar approach takes and gives in clear measure, builds and demolishes in direct proportion to goals.
Lunar influences are soft, shaded, unclear. They are veiled, diaphanous, seductive. Lunar influences act by indirection, suggestion, seduction. They insinuate and imply rather than state clearly. They "network" and entangle, operate in a world where the brightest light isn't much lighter than the shadows. Lunar influences are emotional, appealing to our deepest fears about the security of our homes and health, our loved ones and our fortunes. They also seduce, with hints of passion and longing.
Obviously, no campaign has a lock on either quality. Kerry is becoming more complex and indirect as the campaign progresses, even as he successfully counters charges that he is a "flip-flopper." Bush and Cheney tell us they are strong and solar, but their entanglements in Iraq are very lunar indeed. Edwards is blunt in confronting Cheney about the Administration's lapse in judgment, but becomes vague and suggestive when challenged to state his qualifications for the job of vice president.
The more I considered the situation and the quality of the debates, the more I realized that I was really looking for some sunlight in this election. And it feels as though the sun has set, leaving us all in a Midsummer Night's Dream of illusion, role-playing, hidden craft and manipulative arts.
Edwards is convincing. The old word for putting a spell on someone is to "glamor" them, and Edwards' charm has that quality of glamoring the moment. Kerry is as gaunt and angular as a Giacometti sculpture of Don Quixote. He seems to be wasting away from within, as though he carried a burden too dark and too ancient to be brought into the light of day. The word for Kerry is "Sepulchral": a sepulchre is a monument in a cemetary. Kerry speaks from the grave of innocent young men, in the voice grown dark, dank and hollow with unmeted justices, unbounded sorrows, untellable truths. He is like the ghost of Christmas Past, trying to hold Scrooge accountable for the misdeeds of history. But he doesn't have a clear, sunlit image of the future. He speaks from the memory of a better America, but his plans for dealing with the complex morass of Health Care, Social Security, cities and foreign relations lack a sense of muscular competence. He rides a Harley Davidson, more like a Ring Wraith than a daylit man.
Bush is Bottom...a man with the head of an Ass. When he tries to speak he brays. His idea of persuading people is to assert in loud simple hee-haws, and trust repetition to make up for an absence of reality. Bush is a master of the insider game, speaking to the converted in signals and signs, while using simple scorn to keep the outsiders at bay.
Which leaves Cheney.
Cheney is a solar man who made a pact with the moon, and is visibly showing signs of regretting it. At some point in his life, Cheney developed the capacity for action, for making clear distinctions, for establishing sides and keeping action focussed on taking clear goals. But it didn't get him what he wanted.
He succumbed to a siren in some passage between waters, on some journey that he cannot end. He is a solar man whose sun has abandoned him, leaving him tense and writhing in the lairs of the moon boys and wraiths. He cannot completely leave his lights behind, but his heart is not completely in the shadow play of his cronies.
I didn't know this about him before. But it was written in the blanks where his loyalty to Bush should have been last night, in the effort that was visible as he tried to assert the party line on Hussein one more time. And the Lunar mask fell off completely when the subject of his daughter was broached. He was speechless. He was a father with a strong solar love of his own who could not grovel and pirouette one more time for the damp toads that employed him.
He gathered his cues for one more straight arm in the mush of Edwards before the curtain came down. But it is interesting that the locution that became his verbal logo for the evening was "stand up." He said over and over that we had to "stand up" a strong government in Afghansitan and Iraq, "stand up" free elections, in the rubble of the prey we ran to ground. In his lunar trance he neglected to realize that to be "stood up" means to be abandoned by one's date. And at the end of the dance, Cheney was a solar man in the shadows, alone more than any of the others, too far from his own origins and his own lights to be known.
I felt saddened by this. I never thought I would have a shred of feeling for Cheney, or men like Cheney, who had sold their masculine birthright for the mess of pottage that politics calls "power". But something happened last night that changed that.
If we could figure out what went wrong with Cheney, we could know some part of ourselves that has gone so wrong, so far wrong. He could have been a contender. But he has become a palooka with a sneer and a patchwork heart, boxing in the shadows. No one did it to him. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
Why would any nation do what we have done, to ourselves? That is the question, and no debate moderator is going to ask it. So I ask it, of you and me. Why?
Solar influences are clearly defined, solid, forthright. They are based on courageous actions undertaken for simple clear outcomes. The sun is active, energetic, supports growth and health. At an extreme, the Solar influences become "too much of a good thing"; i.e. too much aggresion, too much simplification, too much heat. The solar approach takes and gives in clear measure, builds and demolishes in direct proportion to goals.
Lunar influences are soft, shaded, unclear. They are veiled, diaphanous, seductive. Lunar influences act by indirection, suggestion, seduction. They insinuate and imply rather than state clearly. They "network" and entangle, operate in a world where the brightest light isn't much lighter than the shadows. Lunar influences are emotional, appealing to our deepest fears about the security of our homes and health, our loved ones and our fortunes. They also seduce, with hints of passion and longing.
Obviously, no campaign has a lock on either quality. Kerry is becoming more complex and indirect as the campaign progresses, even as he successfully counters charges that he is a "flip-flopper." Bush and Cheney tell us they are strong and solar, but their entanglements in Iraq are very lunar indeed. Edwards is blunt in confronting Cheney about the Administration's lapse in judgment, but becomes vague and suggestive when challenged to state his qualifications for the job of vice president.
The more I considered the situation and the quality of the debates, the more I realized that I was really looking for some sunlight in this election. And it feels as though the sun has set, leaving us all in a Midsummer Night's Dream of illusion, role-playing, hidden craft and manipulative arts.
Edwards is convincing. The old word for putting a spell on someone is to "glamor" them, and Edwards' charm has that quality of glamoring the moment. Kerry is as gaunt and angular as a Giacometti sculpture of Don Quixote. He seems to be wasting away from within, as though he carried a burden too dark and too ancient to be brought into the light of day. The word for Kerry is "Sepulchral": a sepulchre is a monument in a cemetary. Kerry speaks from the grave of innocent young men, in the voice grown dark, dank and hollow with unmeted justices, unbounded sorrows, untellable truths. He is like the ghost of Christmas Past, trying to hold Scrooge accountable for the misdeeds of history. But he doesn't have a clear, sunlit image of the future. He speaks from the memory of a better America, but his plans for dealing with the complex morass of Health Care, Social Security, cities and foreign relations lack a sense of muscular competence. He rides a Harley Davidson, more like a Ring Wraith than a daylit man.
Bush is Bottom...a man with the head of an Ass. When he tries to speak he brays. His idea of persuading people is to assert in loud simple hee-haws, and trust repetition to make up for an absence of reality. Bush is a master of the insider game, speaking to the converted in signals and signs, while using simple scorn to keep the outsiders at bay.
Which leaves Cheney.
Cheney is a solar man who made a pact with the moon, and is visibly showing signs of regretting it. At some point in his life, Cheney developed the capacity for action, for making clear distinctions, for establishing sides and keeping action focussed on taking clear goals. But it didn't get him what he wanted.
He succumbed to a siren in some passage between waters, on some journey that he cannot end. He is a solar man whose sun has abandoned him, leaving him tense and writhing in the lairs of the moon boys and wraiths. He cannot completely leave his lights behind, but his heart is not completely in the shadow play of his cronies.
I didn't know this about him before. But it was written in the blanks where his loyalty to Bush should have been last night, in the effort that was visible as he tried to assert the party line on Hussein one more time. And the Lunar mask fell off completely when the subject of his daughter was broached. He was speechless. He was a father with a strong solar love of his own who could not grovel and pirouette one more time for the damp toads that employed him.
He gathered his cues for one more straight arm in the mush of Edwards before the curtain came down. But it is interesting that the locution that became his verbal logo for the evening was "stand up." He said over and over that we had to "stand up" a strong government in Afghansitan and Iraq, "stand up" free elections, in the rubble of the prey we ran to ground. In his lunar trance he neglected to realize that to be "stood up" means to be abandoned by one's date. And at the end of the dance, Cheney was a solar man in the shadows, alone more than any of the others, too far from his own origins and his own lights to be known.
I felt saddened by this. I never thought I would have a shred of feeling for Cheney, or men like Cheney, who had sold their masculine birthright for the mess of pottage that politics calls "power". But something happened last night that changed that.
If we could figure out what went wrong with Cheney, we could know some part of ourselves that has gone so wrong, so far wrong. He could have been a contender. But he has become a palooka with a sneer and a patchwork heart, boxing in the shadows. No one did it to him. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
Why would any nation do what we have done, to ourselves? That is the question, and no debate moderator is going to ask it. So I ask it, of you and me. Why?
1.10.04
Okay Okay the debate already
What is the relationship between a debate and running a country? That should be the question on everyone's minds today.
Bush looked like someone who had just tasted a caraway seed for the first time during most of Kerry's responses, and Kerry looked like the guy who always had the answer in math class. Kerry was very good. If I was casting the role of president, he would be a strong choice. When you think about it, who do you want to cast for the role of president, assuming he would be just following a script handed to him hours or minutes before each scene?
Most people would vote for their dad. Many people would vote for good teachers or strong captains of sports teams they had played on. Many others would vote for Captain Kirk or George Washington or Hercules...mythical figures far removed from the imperfect men they had known in real life.
What about women? Do strong women governors like Ann Richards or strong women senators like Barbara Boxer fit the imago of a National Leader?
I don't think so...but not because they are women. The Senate is a school yard brawl for people with hair helmets. Governorship is like Junior Woodchuck politics...it rises above the parochial inanity of city Bosses, but not high enough to shed its reek of graft, compromise, opportunism, and accident. At the national level we want someone who wears a cape and has no genitals. Someone who has never had a pimple on their butt or stolen a candy bar. We want a president who doesn't scratch themself or call their spouse profane names in the heat of an argument.
If we wanted to cast a woman, she should look like Judy Dench and talk like a 40 year old Katherine Hepburn. Maybe there is someone in the ranks that fits that description. If you know of them, send me email.
The presidency is a figurative role. It rises above the scuffed shoes and broken nails of actual daily life. George Bush Senior hadn't been in a grocery store for 15 years when he went campaigning against Clinton in 92. Bill Clinton hadn't ended a sentence in a preposition since 7th grade.
Kerry was bright, warm, mellow and well paced as a good single malt scotch whiskey. Bush was small, dogged, disarmingly personal and impossibly blind to the details...the beer and schnapps candidate. Kerry calmed down as Bush got more antsy, and he found the presence of mind to pause meaningfully, end his sentences crisply, no matter how much heat burned beneath the surface of his carefully chosen words. Bush's face was the pretentious restaurant's streetside window...inside everything was overdone and the price wasn't mentioned, while outside the muggings and traffic snarls revealed the true mood of the moment.
So what does debating have to do with National Leadership? We don't know. We hope that there is more to the Presidency than a mere figurehead, a carved wooden decoy hiding the men with their guns in the marsh grass. We hope the president can actually choose a domestic and foreign policy, and that his choices aren't limited to the dictates of a curtained cabal. But we aren't sure anymore.
Who looks like a president? Who talks like a president? Where are the Roosevelts, who tempered their patrician presence with the common man's welfare concerns? Where are the Kennedy's who hid their crippling pain behind an urbane, sexy confidence? The only thing common about Kerry is the spelling of his name. The only thing urbane about Bush is the polish on his shoes when he comes out from behind the lectern.
One commentator said Bush talked to us and Kerry lectured us. That doesn't cut it, really. Bush's folksy vocabulary is constantly belied by the desperate tension in his eyes, the alarming silences between subject and predicate when he must reach so deeply into his programming to find the "know" that follows his sputtered "I." And Kerry is just as programmed. He hasn't had a spontaneous moment untainted by opportunity since he was a virgin. Neither candidate is folk. And they want to wear a suit sewn from the cloth of folklore.
Nobody won last night's debate. We are adrift, in America, in a sea of knowledge and opinion. There is no shore in sight. There is no guide star visible in the darkness that descends upon us.
The neocons are reducing all citizens to two dimensional puzzle pieces that they can move at will. The liberals retreat into their vestigal privelege of culture and education and scorn the very energy that could save their myth of a heart-felt politics.
And in the meantime, we know, like Bush, that war and politics are a hard job. We know because the television showed us.
Bush looked like someone who had just tasted a caraway seed for the first time during most of Kerry's responses, and Kerry looked like the guy who always had the answer in math class. Kerry was very good. If I was casting the role of president, he would be a strong choice. When you think about it, who do you want to cast for the role of president, assuming he would be just following a script handed to him hours or minutes before each scene?
Most people would vote for their dad. Many people would vote for good teachers or strong captains of sports teams they had played on. Many others would vote for Captain Kirk or George Washington or Hercules...mythical figures far removed from the imperfect men they had known in real life.
What about women? Do strong women governors like Ann Richards or strong women senators like Barbara Boxer fit the imago of a National Leader?
I don't think so...but not because they are women. The Senate is a school yard brawl for people with hair helmets. Governorship is like Junior Woodchuck politics...it rises above the parochial inanity of city Bosses, but not high enough to shed its reek of graft, compromise, opportunism, and accident. At the national level we want someone who wears a cape and has no genitals. Someone who has never had a pimple on their butt or stolen a candy bar. We want a president who doesn't scratch themself or call their spouse profane names in the heat of an argument.
If we wanted to cast a woman, she should look like Judy Dench and talk like a 40 year old Katherine Hepburn. Maybe there is someone in the ranks that fits that description. If you know of them, send me email.
The presidency is a figurative role. It rises above the scuffed shoes and broken nails of actual daily life. George Bush Senior hadn't been in a grocery store for 15 years when he went campaigning against Clinton in 92. Bill Clinton hadn't ended a sentence in a preposition since 7th grade.
Kerry was bright, warm, mellow and well paced as a good single malt scotch whiskey. Bush was small, dogged, disarmingly personal and impossibly blind to the details...the beer and schnapps candidate. Kerry calmed down as Bush got more antsy, and he found the presence of mind to pause meaningfully, end his sentences crisply, no matter how much heat burned beneath the surface of his carefully chosen words. Bush's face was the pretentious restaurant's streetside window...inside everything was overdone and the price wasn't mentioned, while outside the muggings and traffic snarls revealed the true mood of the moment.
So what does debating have to do with National Leadership? We don't know. We hope that there is more to the Presidency than a mere figurehead, a carved wooden decoy hiding the men with their guns in the marsh grass. We hope the president can actually choose a domestic and foreign policy, and that his choices aren't limited to the dictates of a curtained cabal. But we aren't sure anymore.
Who looks like a president? Who talks like a president? Where are the Roosevelts, who tempered their patrician presence with the common man's welfare concerns? Where are the Kennedy's who hid their crippling pain behind an urbane, sexy confidence? The only thing common about Kerry is the spelling of his name. The only thing urbane about Bush is the polish on his shoes when he comes out from behind the lectern.
One commentator said Bush talked to us and Kerry lectured us. That doesn't cut it, really. Bush's folksy vocabulary is constantly belied by the desperate tension in his eyes, the alarming silences between subject and predicate when he must reach so deeply into his programming to find the "know" that follows his sputtered "I." And Kerry is just as programmed. He hasn't had a spontaneous moment untainted by opportunity since he was a virgin. Neither candidate is folk. And they want to wear a suit sewn from the cloth of folklore.
Nobody won last night's debate. We are adrift, in America, in a sea of knowledge and opinion. There is no shore in sight. There is no guide star visible in the darkness that descends upon us.
The neocons are reducing all citizens to two dimensional puzzle pieces that they can move at will. The liberals retreat into their vestigal privelege of culture and education and scorn the very energy that could save their myth of a heart-felt politics.
And in the meantime, we know, like Bush, that war and politics are a hard job. We know because the television showed us.
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