Firstly, I'm beyond shocked that an aged former New Yorker failed to start this post with a riff echoing Si Syms (not his real name) that "the best voter is an educated voter".
Anyway...
The civics lesson of Point 1 ain't happening as policy. I go into spasm just picturing the blow up if it's tried.
As for Point the 2nd... First step, which may be happening, is avoiding the big, establishment news media. They aren't bad on the big issues, they're literally harmful. Like, to cite a single passing issue, giving a Trump a passing for causing the deaths of a couple of hundred thousand of his nation's people (number of long Covid case greater but never to be quantified) in his refusing to deal with Covid responsibly because doing so would hurt his fee-fees.
It *seems* their audience numbers are in decline. But that raises the next question which is the alternative. What fills the gap of avoiding mainstream news coverage? I mean, reading or watching the news and having one's BS going wild* is one thing, how to get the Great Unwashed to care and want to be informed...? (*We've should take it that BS detectors are maybe close to an extinct trait.) Well, we don't seem to be that kind of people.
And then there's the problem of being so tired out from work that one has no interest in expending the energy to study and do the homework and stuff.
And then there's the huge cohort who believe that it's OK that life in the wealthiest nation on earth is shit but there's no need to do anything about it so extractive, parasitic, anti-democratic fascism, sure, fine.
Forgot to note that Proposal the 1st, important as it is, is of course godless communism, maybe even worse -- anti-fascism. I mean, the very ideas that voters should have a clue and that the state can do good things...
Re: Long COVID - it really helps if you foster the lie that certain things that cause problems for meeting the obligations of what passes for society these days is an imaginary syndrome fueled only by laziness; q.v. fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.
I think he's saying that there are long COVID deniers who say the obvious symptoms people are suffering are just a moral failing rather than an actual disease. This was (and still is to some extent) the response to fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.
Long Covid, by definition is mushy and little known and understood.
I'm assuming that there's more cases of people who got a touch of the 'rona then have suffered or otherwise felt the effects subsequently.
As for Covid deniers, fuck them, and they should all just die.
Also, people who believe that it's fine for the world to be turned into shit because the goal is to die and go to heaven have anything like a right to judge anything on a *moral* basis.
Also give the kid $5 and tell them to go talk to that guy over there on the corner with three big red cups and a ball on a table. If more kids learned to spot a con man maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.
Ah, but the con man's SMART, ain't he? Just look at how smartly he took all that money off those rubes! So smart, let's put him in charge, he'll make us all rich.
That's another form of literacy. Shared references like literary allusions add depth instantly to those in the know. Your reference has a follow-on expansion: Con artists in popular culture. Filmmakers love the con! Movies themselves are a kind of trickery, illusions, and the audience loves to be fooled or to see through the ruse alternatively.
Consider that Trump is a reality TV character. The first monarchs may have in fact been playing a role in rituals. They became real when the violence started (e.g., walking into the Reichstag and gunning down political rivals).
No. He's a CON MAN, remember? He'll make himself rich at everyone else's expense. (Unless he's a member of Leverage. God, I wish those characters really existed. We need them now.)
What's the one that starts with finding a wallet full of money in the street? The mark's gotta think he's in on stealing someone else's money. If he says "Let's return this wallet to its rightful owner!" the whole thing falls apart.
Admittedly, you gotta be kind of intelligent in a fashion to run a game; knowing what people want to hear, staying consistent with your story, knowing when to pack up and grab a train out of town. But here we have maybe the New Con - just fucking lie until nobody cares if you're consistent, say the horrible things they hide under their public presentation, appeal to their fear and greed. Apparently my father thinks it's okay to chuck me into the volcano if it keeps his bank account intact, and has no fucking Idea why I might not feel the same.
"Apparently my father thinks it's okay to chuck me into the volcano if it keeps his bank account intact, and has no fucking Idea why I might not feel the same."
That's the thing, right there. As long as *someone else* is suffering, but not me, it's OK. (Preferably offstage, where you can't hear their screams.)
Who's with you? Most of us are. Sadly, modern education absolutely is not.
Now, of course, we have the Rightwing intrusion into education to make sure that God and Gunz are in the classroom, gays and civil rights are not, and the "liberal agenda" of indoctrinating the kids with knowledge and thinking are driven into the wilderness.
There was never not ”Rightwing intrusion” into education, at least since the Cold War. What do you think all that anti-Communism we all drank down in school? What else would all that anti-Blackness & anti-indigeneity have been? What else do you think the “Patriot Myth” that undergirds all US History is?
I do not think there was much anti-Communism in my youthful education in South Dakota in the 60s and 70s. There was much in the culture but not much in my education
I know I live in a liberal bubble, no doubt it's different elsewhere, but the public schools are (mostly) on the side of the angels, they're the place where ideas like "trans kids should be treated decently and not bullied" originate. Yes, the bullying starts in the school, but the anti-bullying movement starts there too. That's why the fascists and fundamentalists hate them so, they correctly see the schools as a center of resistance against fascism and fundamentalism.
Fair. But I have no kids to harangue within roughly a parsec. Could I just randomly distribute old George seldes or IF Stone tracts? Maybe some Howard Zinn?
Note that the civics textbook used as an example dates from 1917. For years one of my older sisters worked on a project analyzing textbooks and the decline in pedagogy over the 20th century, during which schoolbooks have been steadily dumbed down. Our corporate overlords really do want a populace of mindless drones — and they've made one. The latest and most shocking atrocity was the insistence on "whole language learning" to "teach" reading. Instead of the lessons in phonics we got, kids were given books and then somehow magically expected to teach themselves reading. It's been a dismal failure, and now the pendulum has swung back to phonics — only today's teachers were never taught phonics or how to teach it. Reading abilities in the U.S. are worse than they have ever been.
As I said before, my new AmeriCorps contract consists of phonics for struggling 1st and 2nd graders. The school happens to use the same system. "Whole Language" is called out as bunk.
(I seem to have learned the latter way, auto-didactically; but I'm unusual, as was my prole childhood. We were basically itinerant. I lived at several dozen places before age twelve, due to my father's addictions and criminality. So I never went to the same school for a full year, and was often absent or not yet enrolled. Books were my refuge. Adult fare starting at about nine.)
Anyway, the phonics lessons seem to be working already. I thank the Gods that I don't have to teach them to spell English. It's primarily oral, but directly applicable to written literacy.
Some of the kids are so sweet! They really seem to like me. They certainly like being pulled from class.
USC's Steve Krashen was my exposure to whole language research. I used the approach in my classrooms. I think the disconnect and failure starts earlier, even before birth. A child born into a socio-economically advantaged family, print-rich household with loquacious adults who read regularly including out loud to each other and the kids has a huge advantage. By kindergarten low SE Score kids know they are starting well behind, research has shown.
We are complex creatures and can compensate, but our social organizations and hierarchies now are not designed to raise us all up. MAGA has a different vision, leaving the whole world blind, ignorant and fearful.
Admittedly one of the important things in teaching reading is promoting*WANTING* to read. Can't count the people over the last six decades who've stared at me blankly for reading a huge book for fun, or God help me, a RPG manual.
"I read for fun" is somehow considered weird. And when I tell someone what I'm reading--usually history--they always counter with "Oh, I like reading but I never have time". But can tell you all the details on Real Housewives of Whatever.
OK, my resolve to stay offline lasted about 24 hours, the siren song of REBID is too powerful, lol. But I am off social media and plan to remain so for a good long while. I’ve cancelled my NYT subscription. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of new Substacks in the last 24 hours, and that’s how I plan to get my news going forward.
Civics is HUGE for me. Like you say Roy, government isn’t a vending machine you passively feed coins into to get goodies out. Understanding how it works, why it works the way it does, and crucially how you as a citizen and voter can influence it is a vanished concept that most people under 40 don’t have a clue about. Just one example is the tendency to withhold your vote in protest, or if neither candidate appeals to you. Insanity! Politicians don’t pander to non-voters, there’s nothing in it for them. And it’s not only acceptable to vote for a candidate you don’t care for to stop a candidate that’s worse, it’s mandatory.
I honestly don’t know how to teach the skill of being a discerning consumer of news in this media environment. Teaching how to tell fact from opinion is vital, of course, but I don’t know how we’d combat a TikTok favorite endorsing a stupid policy. I don’t know how you teach a young person to realize you can still enjoy someone’s content while disagreeing with them. “Received” opinion, indeed.
**And it’s not only acceptable to vote for a candidate you don’t care for to stop a candidate that’s worse, it’s mandatory.**
This is great.
I’m trying to come up with a pithy nugget of wisdom for when these single-issue purists demand unsullied perfection, free from compromise and political calculation, before they offer up their precious vote.
“You’re not voting for yourself, you’re voting for everyone you care about” doesn’t quite nail it, but it’s the best I got so far.
Wish I could remember the Barney Frank quote verbatim. Something like: I voted for a candidate I completely agreed with only once. Then, I ran for a second term.
It's also not a capitalistic consumer purchase. "I don't like what you're selling, so I'm not buying it with my vote." (But the other guy is worse.) "I'm not buying his, either."
No. If there are two kinds of mayonnaise on offer, and you don't buy either one, you just live without it. In politics, you're going to be force-fed one or the other whether you like it or not. So pick the least objectionable.
To be clear, even if you do something stupid like counting all Stein's votes for one candidate, she didn't get enough votes to materially alter any recent election
Yes, she got about 12,000 votes in Wisconsin, about a third of Trump's (small) margin of victory.
And that's a pretty accurate measure of the number of lefties who refuse to vote for the Democrats out of principle - its a tiny, tiny minority, less than half a percent of the voting population. The Democrats have a much bigger problem with people simply opting out of voting altogether.
I wish this was obvious to more people than it is. The "message" they think they're sending with their non vote is actually "I'm someone you don't have to pay attention to." Like the people who chose not to vote for Harris because of Gaza: what do you think is going to happen to Gaza when Trump gets in?
Political Party - a loosely knit organization that tries to control government by winning elections
I learned that definition in eighth grade civics. We had another class my senior year. And this was in a redneck farm town of 1500 people. The kind of place that kept all the black people living in one four block area of town that didn't have street lights or sewer and never got the snow plowed in the winter. It was a racist ass little redneck town but everybody still had to take two classes of civics.
I didn't grow up to be a stupid asshole, at least when it came to politics.
I look at the results of the election and I wonder if it's possible to run an effective democracy when it's saturated with bad social media. If you bombard people with bad information you can make a significant number of them believe whatever you want them to - oh shit...
There is a positive note in the fact that fascism just doesn't work. There would be 200-year-old fascist governments if worked at all.. I know, Volkswagens and all the trains ran on time. That was okay but within 10 years the countries got blown to shit. And it's probably nothing noble like the citizens wised up to the clarion call of freedom. It's rich people wising up to the fact that if you pay people a decent wage and they've got money and they can buy things and the economy is good. That's counterintuitive to Rich Fucks who rate having to pay overtime right up there with Prometheus getting his liver chewed out every night
Great observations about social media's affect. Even the intellectual lefties buy into oddball conspiracies. Take these election results. I see these Democrats asking how and then jumping to it must've been rigged.
No. The turnout numbers and demographics skew differently. People were voting on low info, snap decisions motivated more by fear and risk aversion, and sexist/racist biases. That's who they are.
I take my own self as the exception proving the rule. I have only recently overcome my racism and sexism when it comes to politics and voting biases. Add class snobbery.
What's the joke? Carlin was it? We need a better electorate! That's at the heart of this debacle. Where are all the other eligible voters in this? The turnout was low.
Trump's support was motivated by grievance and fear. It has real conditions that get hyped by imagination and selective aka confirmation bias. They perceive him as a victim like themselves. Inequities of wealth stand out more than economic indicators. Their hoped are inverted resentments.
I see these things clearly because I am not in a liberal bubble. My fascist adjacent friend in Georgia called me to catch up. No election talk. Only personal framed by, "K, you know you are one of my favorite people on Earth, don't you?"
One more point: If lefties start doubting elections and institutions of democracy like the other side and resort to other means devolving into political violence, then we are done for.
The Spanish Civil War should be our cautionary tale. And BTW, recall Franco's regime did outlast the others. The other notable authoritarian success story could be China but that's more complicated.
"I look at the results of the election and I wonder if it's possible to run an effective democracy when it's saturated with bad social media."
This. Add Fox News. Most media, for better or worse, seek to inform--even if it's according to their political bias. Fox News seeks to anger and frighten, which is to say, to stimulate emotion rather than convey information. Its topics are not about facts, but about enemies. Trump is the first candidate (at least in my lifetime) to run entirely against enemies, however invented and fake.
Always remember that we have Fox News thanks to what happened to Nixon, and the way the Republican Party thought the "liberal media" was unfair to him.
Maybe, but I believe it was Mencken who observed that: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" like a hundred years ago.
There is no doubt a major portion of Our New Collective Shame can be attributed to appalling lack of education. But let’s get to the real cause: No Child Left Behind, which savaged both district budgets & forced changes to curriculum to accommodate those new (snowballing) shortfalls. Things had been bad before, but that one piece of legislation was the mortal wound.
That pushed many to home-school or go into private religious schools, where anti-Civics was the Core Curriculum, & some with public school dollars subsidizing their indoctrination.
We’re now at a point where millions need de-programming rather than congenial coaxing through debate or discourse. —Who’s going to pay for that??—
That is a new take to me. I’ll have look into the history of NCLB. I’ve attributed the decline in my children’s schooling to the 2010 Republican take over in Wisconsin and the gutting of teachers unions.
I'm a teacher, by profession and disposition, so you'll never see me saying no to "teach more." But I wonder if the problem isn't more fundamental, that it's with our whole relationship to government. Not seeing it as a thing that we all create and run together, but as a thing outside ourselves, a "service provider". You don't like the service you get from Verizon, switch to AT&T. You don't like the level of service you're receiving from Team D, just switch to the R. Then, four years from now, dissatisfied with R, you switch back to D (if you're allowed to.)
Absolutely this. And I think this has been going on for a while, you see it in the tendency of voters to elect the other party's candidate every 8 years, and vote against the president's party in the midterms. It's scattershot and stupid, and goes a long way toward furthering stagnation. But for it to be otherwise people would have to 1) have an ideology, 2) understand how a party will further that ideology, and 3) have the patience to stay the course. Unfortunately, ideologically driven conservatives are much better at doing this than moderates OR liberals.
It's just the shallowness of it all that appalls me. It's either "Everything sucks, let's put the other one in" or "Everything sucks, I'm outta here." And I'm not at all disagreeing with "Everything sucks", but oh boy, if you think everything sucks now...
And we need to be honest about what Biden's win meant in 2020, because we relied on these same, shallow, disengaged "Time for a change" voters ourselves, then. Not a real repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, just dissatisfied "consumers" who put in a bad Yelp review and try the place across the street.
Excellent point! We saw what we wanted to see: voters moving away from a wanna-be, unqualified tyrant and back toward an embrace of democracy. But it wasn't that at all, it wasn't a repudiation, it was simply people trying the place across the street to see if it provides better food and service.
But this time they didn’t flock back to the yam—he got fewer votes after all—they just decided to stay home and throw something in the microwave instead.
Two basic facts about Trump: 1) He's a fascist and an extinction-level threat to our country and maybe the planet and 2) He's a senile buffoon seem to work at cross-purposes to one another. Take the threat seriously! Look at the fool in his orange vest in a garbage truck! Didja hear this crazy shit he said about sharks and electrocution?
The oscillation between parties is real, and it’s especially crippling in our dumb system where divided government yields gridlock. A parliamentary system at least allows the winning party to implement some of its agenda for the voters to sample; ours produces gridlock by design, as though that were a virtue, and layers on never-ending election cycles to make sure nothing gets done but posturing.
My theory is that the President is the only one that our precious low-info voters can name (it's actually a question doctors ask you after you suffer a head trauma!) and so he's the only one they know to blame.
Ongoing war aka genocide in the Middle East and the usual sense of being disenfranchised - cut out of the decision-making with backroom deals and elites like Oprah, other celebs and billionaires such as Mark Cuban having more say, instead of ordinary voters. There was apparently less enthusiasm on all fronts. The turnout was comparatively low with 2020. There are other factors we can point to, like Trump picking up a percentage of black and LatinX male voters. Misinformation about the economy and how bad Trump is (e.g., the major media not being consistent on his unhinged-ness and obvious failing health) left low information voters sticking to their loyalties and most inconsistent voters less than inspired. The elites have rigged things and they feel disconnected from the process and power. That's what I'm hearing and reading.
I've been saying for a long time now that the conservative idea of "federal government" is an alien brain that landed in America in the mid-60s and has the country under its evil domination.
I think we're seeing now how well that fits in with a general alienation from everything. Make people alienated and cynical, and then the ideas of the Party of Alienation and Cynicism will just seem like common sense.
And then jump into governing like alla the rest of 'em...that's the funniest part to me. "Government is stealing from you and me! I want into that grift! Elect me!"
I was hoping, among other things, for a revitalized Department of Education under President Harris to begin a grants program to encourage local school districts to implement some sort of uniform civics curriculum--or SOMETHING to improve on the horrendous ignorance most people have about government. Unfortunately, generations of Republican sabotage have gutted civics OUT of most curricula, and (as someone pointed out below) they not only created the problem, they also ruined the possibility of fixing it, leaving us with an electorate that can't tell the difference between public service and pro wrestling. I can foresee little clandestine coffee-klatches of civics education, late at night, when the clampdown comes--groups of five or ten kids huddled over a civics textbook, learning in wonder about the representative democracy we used to enjoy. I love your advocacy for civics education! Thanks for writing the post!
I'm old enough to have actually taken a Civics class in public high school. We learned about structure of our government, how elections worked, and even became relatively well-versed as to the content of ALL the Constitutional amendments. Now I live in a state where the senior Senator can't even identify the three branches of government. The devolution of civics education has served to make us collectively less informed and interested in how shit actually works.
Social media, according to Timothy Snyder and others, has had a bigger impact. Intelligence and attention spans have gone down in all of us.
We are more reactive. I see it in my older posts. I have taken steps to counteract.
You touch on it with this notion of "media literacy." Literacy has many levels. There was an article by Resnick and Resnick about it before books like The Bell Curve and Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.
There was that whole thing in the 1980s about the dumbing down of America, which was entirely unscientific. Mostly aging people sensing their own estrangement from the world.
I did some reading and more reflection at the time about what literacy is. And propaganda, the history of public relations and advertising, starting with Edward Bernays.
Now psychology and neuroscience has gone well beyond the cheap tricks still used. We can become aware but never entirely inoculated.
This remains a work in progress. History is also a good focus. Historical literacy and seeing where a text is opinion and not analysis or fact.
I just read Galbraith about the 1929 crash. And How Democracies Die. This is excellent stuff.
Pop quiz: How is our American moment like and unlike Germany when Hitler was elected? Lay out the economic, political, and social differences. Why is it more or less probable the US will descend into such a despotic state? Include something about political violence.
In the interest of The Rectification of the Names, I propose that the office of the President be renamed "Determiner of the Price of Eggs and Gas", to match the popular understanding.
Thanks. I'mo donate 'em to that nice man on my phone who promises a 900% match. I'm not really certain how that is different from a regular old match – maybe they strike easier...
Now where is that guy...
Huh. Seems like he's takin' the day off. Musta done real good in the matchstick market the last couple days...
Roy Edroso addresses the Maryland State Education Commission, Curriculum Committee:
That's what has got to be in it. [points vaguely to the southeast] The Capitol dome. It should come to life for every boy. All lighted up too. Boys forget what their country means - By just reading "Land of the Free" in history books. Men forget even more. Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: "I'm free... to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't. I can. And my children will." Boys ought to grow up remembering that.
Firstly, I'm beyond shocked that an aged former New Yorker failed to start this post with a riff echoing Si Syms (not his real name) that "the best voter is an educated voter".
Anyway...
The civics lesson of Point 1 ain't happening as policy. I go into spasm just picturing the blow up if it's tried.
As for Point the 2nd... First step, which may be happening, is avoiding the big, establishment news media. They aren't bad on the big issues, they're literally harmful. Like, to cite a single passing issue, giving a Trump a passing for causing the deaths of a couple of hundred thousand of his nation's people (number of long Covid case greater but never to be quantified) in his refusing to deal with Covid responsibly because doing so would hurt his fee-fees.
It *seems* their audience numbers are in decline. But that raises the next question which is the alternative. What fills the gap of avoiding mainstream news coverage? I mean, reading or watching the news and having one's BS going wild* is one thing, how to get the Great Unwashed to care and want to be informed...? (*We've should take it that BS detectors are maybe close to an extinct trait.) Well, we don't seem to be that kind of people.
And then there's the problem of being so tired out from work that one has no interest in expending the energy to study and do the homework and stuff.
And then there's the huge cohort who believe that it's OK that life in the wealthiest nation on earth is shit but there's no need to do anything about it so extractive, parasitic, anti-democratic fascism, sure, fine.
It's complicated AF.
Forgot to note that Proposal the 1st, important as it is, is of course godless communism, maybe even worse -- anti-fascism. I mean, the very ideas that voters should have a clue and that the state can do good things...
Re: Long COVID - it really helps if you foster the lie that certain things that cause problems for meeting the obligations of what passes for society these days is an imaginary syndrome fueled only by laziness; q.v. fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.
You lost me.
Are you saying there’s no such thing as long covid so that there’s a lot of misdiagnoses? Or something else?
I think he's saying that there are long COVID deniers who say the obvious symptoms people are suffering are just a moral failing rather than an actual disease. This was (and still is to some extent) the response to fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Long Covid, by definition is mushy and little known and understood.
I'm assuming that there's more cases of people who got a touch of the 'rona then have suffered or otherwise felt the effects subsequently.
As for Covid deniers, fuck them, and they should all just die.
Also, people who believe that it's fine for the world to be turned into shit because the goal is to die and go to heaven have anything like a right to judge anything on a *moral* basis.
Also give the kid $5 and tell them to go talk to that guy over there on the corner with three big red cups and a ball on a table. If more kids learned to spot a con man maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.
Ah, but the con man's SMART, ain't he? Just look at how smartly he took all that money off those rubes! So smart, let's put him in charge, he'll make us all rich.
Some of them know he's a con man, they just think he's Henry Gondorf.
That's another form of literacy. Shared references like literary allusions add depth instantly to those in the know. Your reference has a follow-on expansion: Con artists in popular culture. Filmmakers love the con! Movies themselves are a kind of trickery, illusions, and the audience loves to be fooled or to see through the ruse alternatively.
Consider that Trump is a reality TV character. The first monarchs may have in fact been playing a role in rituals. They became real when the violence started (e.g., walking into the Reichstag and gunning down political rivals).
No. He's a CON MAN, remember? He'll make himself rich at everyone else's expense. (Unless he's a member of Leverage. God, I wish those characters really existed. We need them now.)
What's the one that starts with finding a wallet full of money in the street? The mark's gotta think he's in on stealing someone else's money. If he says "Let's return this wallet to its rightful owner!" the whole thing falls apart.
Admittedly, you gotta be kind of intelligent in a fashion to run a game; knowing what people want to hear, staying consistent with your story, knowing when to pack up and grab a train out of town. But here we have maybe the New Con - just fucking lie until nobody cares if you're consistent, say the horrible things they hide under their public presentation, appeal to their fear and greed. Apparently my father thinks it's okay to chuck me into the volcano if it keeps his bank account intact, and has no fucking Idea why I might not feel the same.
"Apparently my father thinks it's okay to chuck me into the volcano if it keeps his bank account intact, and has no fucking Idea why I might not feel the same."
That's the thing, right there. As long as *someone else* is suffering, but not me, it's OK. (Preferably offstage, where you can't hear their screams.)
Who's with you? Most of us are. Sadly, modern education absolutely is not.
Now, of course, we have the Rightwing intrusion into education to make sure that God and Gunz are in the classroom, gays and civil rights are not, and the "liberal agenda" of indoctrinating the kids with knowledge and thinking are driven into the wilderness.
There was never not ”Rightwing intrusion” into education, at least since the Cold War. What do you think all that anti-Communism we all drank down in school? What else would all that anti-Blackness & anti-indigeneity have been? What else do you think the “Patriot Myth” that undergirds all US History is?
I do not think there was much anti-Communism in my youthful education in South Dakota in the 60s and 70s. There was much in the culture but not much in my education
I know I live in a liberal bubble, no doubt it's different elsewhere, but the public schools are (mostly) on the side of the angels, they're the place where ideas like "trans kids should be treated decently and not bullied" originate. Yes, the bullying starts in the school, but the anti-bullying movement starts there too. That's why the fascists and fundamentalists hate them so, they correctly see the schools as a center of resistance against fascism and fundamentalism.
Goes with my experience
Fair. But I have no kids to harangue within roughly a parsec. Could I just randomly distribute old George seldes or IF Stone tracts? Maybe some Howard Zinn?
Leftist kids read Howard Zinn, how else do you think they become “unreasonable radicals” we seem to all be here to deplore?
Old IWW pamphlets. Those guys knew how to talk to reg'lar folks.
Note that the civics textbook used as an example dates from 1917. For years one of my older sisters worked on a project analyzing textbooks and the decline in pedagogy over the 20th century, during which schoolbooks have been steadily dumbed down. Our corporate overlords really do want a populace of mindless drones — and they've made one. The latest and most shocking atrocity was the insistence on "whole language learning" to "teach" reading. Instead of the lessons in phonics we got, kids were given books and then somehow magically expected to teach themselves reading. It's been a dismal failure, and now the pendulum has swung back to phonics — only today's teachers were never taught phonics or how to teach it. Reading abilities in the U.S. are worse than they have ever been.
As I said before, my new AmeriCorps contract consists of phonics for struggling 1st and 2nd graders. The school happens to use the same system. "Whole Language" is called out as bunk.
(I seem to have learned the latter way, auto-didactically; but I'm unusual, as was my prole childhood. We were basically itinerant. I lived at several dozen places before age twelve, due to my father's addictions and criminality. So I never went to the same school for a full year, and was often absent or not yet enrolled. Books were my refuge. Adult fare starting at about nine.)
Anyway, the phonics lessons seem to be working already. I thank the Gods that I don't have to teach them to spell English. It's primarily oral, but directly applicable to written literacy.
Some of the kids are so sweet! They really seem to like me. They certainly like being pulled from class.
USC's Steve Krashen was my exposure to whole language research. I used the approach in my classrooms. I think the disconnect and failure starts earlier, even before birth. A child born into a socio-economically advantaged family, print-rich household with loquacious adults who read regularly including out loud to each other and the kids has a huge advantage. By kindergarten low SE Score kids know they are starting well behind, research has shown.
We are complex creatures and can compensate, but our social organizations and hierarchies now are not designed to raise us all up. MAGA has a different vision, leaving the whole world blind, ignorant and fearful.
Thank you for this. I’m about to pull a few kids!…
Admittedly one of the important things in teaching reading is promoting*WANTING* to read. Can't count the people over the last six decades who've stared at me blankly for reading a huge book for fun, or God help me, a RPG manual.
"I read for fun" is somehow considered weird. And when I tell someone what I'm reading--usually history--they always counter with "Oh, I like reading but I never have time". But can tell you all the details on Real Housewives of Whatever.
kids were given books and then somehow magically expected to teach themselves reading.
This is basically how I taught myself to read at like 3 years old
OK, my resolve to stay offline lasted about 24 hours, the siren song of REBID is too powerful, lol. But I am off social media and plan to remain so for a good long while. I’ve cancelled my NYT subscription. I’ve subscribed to a bunch of new Substacks in the last 24 hours, and that’s how I plan to get my news going forward.
Civics is HUGE for me. Like you say Roy, government isn’t a vending machine you passively feed coins into to get goodies out. Understanding how it works, why it works the way it does, and crucially how you as a citizen and voter can influence it is a vanished concept that most people under 40 don’t have a clue about. Just one example is the tendency to withhold your vote in protest, or if neither candidate appeals to you. Insanity! Politicians don’t pander to non-voters, there’s nothing in it for them. And it’s not only acceptable to vote for a candidate you don’t care for to stop a candidate that’s worse, it’s mandatory.
I honestly don’t know how to teach the skill of being a discerning consumer of news in this media environment. Teaching how to tell fact from opinion is vital, of course, but I don’t know how we’d combat a TikTok favorite endorsing a stupid policy. I don’t know how you teach a young person to realize you can still enjoy someone’s content while disagreeing with them. “Received” opinion, indeed.
Welcome back!
**And it’s not only acceptable to vote for a candidate you don’t care for to stop a candidate that’s worse, it’s mandatory.**
This is great.
I’m trying to come up with a pithy nugget of wisdom for when these single-issue purists demand unsullied perfection, free from compromise and political calculation, before they offer up their precious vote.
“You’re not voting for yourself, you’re voting for everyone you care about” doesn’t quite nail it, but it’s the best I got so far.
My mantra is “Voting isn’t a love letter, it’s a chess move.”
Nice!
And There Is No Perfect Candidate.
Wish I could remember the Barney Frank quote verbatim. Something like: I voted for a candidate I completely agreed with only once. Then, I ran for a second term.
It's also not a capitalistic consumer purchase. "I don't like what you're selling, so I'm not buying it with my vote." (But the other guy is worse.) "I'm not buying his, either."
No. If there are two kinds of mayonnaise on offer, and you don't buy either one, you just live without it. In politics, you're going to be force-fed one or the other whether you like it or not. So pick the least objectionable.
Oh sure, come up with the can't-miss mayonnaise analogy AFTER the election. Where were you when there were Jill Stein voters to be won over?
It's no good. We'll have to use Miracle Whip.
When the Stein's set out too long, you must whip it.
To be clear, even if you do something stupid like counting all Stein's votes for one candidate, she didn't get enough votes to materially alter any recent election
Yes, she got about 12,000 votes in Wisconsin, about a third of Trump's (small) margin of victory.
And that's a pretty accurate measure of the number of lefties who refuse to vote for the Democrats out of principle - its a tiny, tiny minority, less than half a percent of the voting population. The Democrats have a much bigger problem with people simply opting out of voting altogether.
I wish this was obvious to more people than it is. The "message" they think they're sending with their non vote is actually "I'm someone you don't have to pay attention to." Like the people who chose not to vote for Harris because of Gaza: what do you think is going to happen to Gaza when Trump gets in?
You have to be careful here because this can easily turn into "you need to conform to my purity, not yours"
Political Party - a loosely knit organization that tries to control government by winning elections
I learned that definition in eighth grade civics. We had another class my senior year. And this was in a redneck farm town of 1500 people. The kind of place that kept all the black people living in one four block area of town that didn't have street lights or sewer and never got the snow plowed in the winter. It was a racist ass little redneck town but everybody still had to take two classes of civics.
I didn't grow up to be a stupid asshole, at least when it came to politics.
I look at the results of the election and I wonder if it's possible to run an effective democracy when it's saturated with bad social media. If you bombard people with bad information you can make a significant number of them believe whatever you want them to - oh shit...
There is a positive note in the fact that fascism just doesn't work. There would be 200-year-old fascist governments if worked at all.. I know, Volkswagens and all the trains ran on time. That was okay but within 10 years the countries got blown to shit. And it's probably nothing noble like the citizens wised up to the clarion call of freedom. It's rich people wising up to the fact that if you pay people a decent wage and they've got money and they can buy things and the economy is good. That's counterintuitive to Rich Fucks who rate having to pay overtime right up there with Prometheus getting his liver chewed out every night
Yikes!
Great observations about social media's affect. Even the intellectual lefties buy into oddball conspiracies. Take these election results. I see these Democrats asking how and then jumping to it must've been rigged.
No. The turnout numbers and demographics skew differently. People were voting on low info, snap decisions motivated more by fear and risk aversion, and sexist/racist biases. That's who they are.
I take my own self as the exception proving the rule. I have only recently overcome my racism and sexism when it comes to politics and voting biases. Add class snobbery.
What's the joke? Carlin was it? We need a better electorate! That's at the heart of this debacle. Where are all the other eligible voters in this? The turnout was low.
Trump's support was motivated by grievance and fear. It has real conditions that get hyped by imagination and selective aka confirmation bias. They perceive him as a victim like themselves. Inequities of wealth stand out more than economic indicators. Their hoped are inverted resentments.
I see these things clearly because I am not in a liberal bubble. My fascist adjacent friend in Georgia called me to catch up. No election talk. Only personal framed by, "K, you know you are one of my favorite people on Earth, don't you?"
I'm beloved by the extreme right at work, too.
One more point: If lefties start doubting elections and institutions of democracy like the other side and resort to other means devolving into political violence, then we are done for.
The Spanish Civil War should be our cautionary tale. And BTW, recall Franco's regime did outlast the others. The other notable authoritarian success story could be China but that's more complicated.
"I look at the results of the election and I wonder if it's possible to run an effective democracy when it's saturated with bad social media."
This. Add Fox News. Most media, for better or worse, seek to inform--even if it's according to their political bias. Fox News seeks to anger and frighten, which is to say, to stimulate emotion rather than convey information. Its topics are not about facts, but about enemies. Trump is the first candidate (at least in my lifetime) to run entirely against enemies, however invented and fake.
Always remember that we have Fox News thanks to what happened to Nixon, and the way the Republican Party thought the "liberal media" was unfair to him.
And avenging Nixon led to the inheritor who learned much of the how-to-do-politics component of his con as part of Ailes's target audience.
Maybe, but I believe it was Mencken who observed that: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" like a hundred years ago.
Counterpoint: Donald Trump was able to go broke running a casino, and there's a first time for everything.
Mencken was a proto-fascist so maybe not the best quote giver
He moved that direction as he aged certainly where he was when he said this, I don't know, but then there is also the stopped clock theory.
He was a proto-fascist (well maybe more elitist) pre/during WW1, so this goes way back with him
There is no doubt a major portion of Our New Collective Shame can be attributed to appalling lack of education. But let’s get to the real cause: No Child Left Behind, which savaged both district budgets & forced changes to curriculum to accommodate those new (snowballing) shortfalls. Things had been bad before, but that one piece of legislation was the mortal wound.
That pushed many to home-school or go into private religious schools, where anti-Civics was the Core Curriculum, & some with public school dollars subsidizing their indoctrination.
We’re now at a point where millions need de-programming rather than congenial coaxing through debate or discourse. —Who’s going to pay for that??—
That is a new take to me. I’ll have look into the history of NCLB. I’ve attributed the decline in my children’s schooling to the 2010 Republican take over in Wisconsin and the gutting of teachers unions.
Cutting education budgets so as to force focus entirely on basic subjects easily tested for... huh... 🤔
I'm a teacher, by profession and disposition, so you'll never see me saying no to "teach more." But I wonder if the problem isn't more fundamental, that it's with our whole relationship to government. Not seeing it as a thing that we all create and run together, but as a thing outside ourselves, a "service provider". You don't like the service you get from Verizon, switch to AT&T. You don't like the level of service you're receiving from Team D, just switch to the R. Then, four years from now, dissatisfied with R, you switch back to D (if you're allowed to.)
Absolutely this. And I think this has been going on for a while, you see it in the tendency of voters to elect the other party's candidate every 8 years, and vote against the president's party in the midterms. It's scattershot and stupid, and goes a long way toward furthering stagnation. But for it to be otherwise people would have to 1) have an ideology, 2) understand how a party will further that ideology, and 3) have the patience to stay the course. Unfortunately, ideologically driven conservatives are much better at doing this than moderates OR liberals.
It's just the shallowness of it all that appalls me. It's either "Everything sucks, let's put the other one in" or "Everything sucks, I'm outta here." And I'm not at all disagreeing with "Everything sucks", but oh boy, if you think everything sucks now...
Impact of social media. Low attention span, low information, knee-jerk reactions and lack of impulse control.
And we need to be honest about what Biden's win meant in 2020, because we relied on these same, shallow, disengaged "Time for a change" voters ourselves, then. Not a real repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, just dissatisfied "consumers" who put in a bad Yelp review and try the place across the street.
Excellent point! We saw what we wanted to see: voters moving away from a wanna-be, unqualified tyrant and back toward an embrace of democracy. But it wasn't that at all, it wasn't a repudiation, it was simply people trying the place across the street to see if it provides better food and service.
But this time they didn’t flock back to the yam—he got fewer votes after all—they just decided to stay home and throw something in the microwave instead.
So many people - and so many young people - didn't fear Trump the way we thought they should:
https://youtu.be/nno64FGj8d0
Two basic facts about Trump: 1) He's a fascist and an extinction-level threat to our country and maybe the planet and 2) He's a senile buffoon seem to work at cross-purposes to one another. Take the threat seriously! Look at the fool in his orange vest in a garbage truck! Didja hear this crazy shit he said about sharks and electrocution?
Well, this is due to become the longest reddit of all time. https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
The oscillation between parties is real, and it’s especially crippling in our dumb system where divided government yields gridlock. A parliamentary system at least allows the winning party to implement some of its agenda for the voters to sample; ours produces gridlock by design, as though that were a virtue, and layers on never-ending election cycles to make sure nothing gets done but posturing.
Incumbency used to be an advantage in a Presidential race, not any more. Strangely, still advantageous for the Senate and Congress.
My theory is that the President is the only one that our precious low-info voters can name (it's actually a question doctors ask you after you suffer a head trauma!) and so he's the only one they know to blame.
Note: This is only the second time Alan Lichtman with his Keys to the White House was wrong. Why? What key did he miss, or what has changed?
Why did several million Dems not show up?
Ongoing war aka genocide in the Middle East and the usual sense of being disenfranchised - cut out of the decision-making with backroom deals and elites like Oprah, other celebs and billionaires such as Mark Cuban having more say, instead of ordinary voters. There was apparently less enthusiasm on all fronts. The turnout was comparatively low with 2020. There are other factors we can point to, like Trump picking up a percentage of black and LatinX male voters. Misinformation about the economy and how bad Trump is (e.g., the major media not being consistent on his unhinged-ness and obvious failing health) left low information voters sticking to their loyalties and most inconsistent voters less than inspired. The elites have rigged things and they feel disconnected from the process and power. That's what I'm hearing and reading.
MLK had the moderates nailed 60 years ago
I've been saying for a long time now that the conservative idea of "federal government" is an alien brain that landed in America in the mid-60s and has the country under its evil domination.
I think we're seeing now how well that fits in with a general alienation from everything. Make people alienated and cynical, and then the ideas of the Party of Alienation and Cynicism will just seem like common sense.
And then jump into governing like alla the rest of 'em...that's the funniest part to me. "Government is stealing from you and me! I want into that grift! Elect me!"
You nailed it, Steve. Consumers rather than participants, spectators not actors in government, history, even our own lives.
Here's a wonderful performance! From a couple of weeks ago. I meant to include it in my comment but someone interrupted me with a quick work question.
People's priorities are fucked up if you ask me
https://youtu.be/rI15W-BBhrw?si=UMJckez23OHBT7xK
I was hoping, among other things, for a revitalized Department of Education under President Harris to begin a grants program to encourage local school districts to implement some sort of uniform civics curriculum--or SOMETHING to improve on the horrendous ignorance most people have about government. Unfortunately, generations of Republican sabotage have gutted civics OUT of most curricula, and (as someone pointed out below) they not only created the problem, they also ruined the possibility of fixing it, leaving us with an electorate that can't tell the difference between public service and pro wrestling. I can foresee little clandestine coffee-klatches of civics education, late at night, when the clampdown comes--groups of five or ten kids huddled over a civics textbook, learning in wonder about the representative democracy we used to enjoy. I love your advocacy for civics education! Thanks for writing the post!
Break the government, then point out how little the government is doing - the conservative mission since 1980.
Kayfabe all the way down...
I'm old enough to have actually taken a Civics class in public high school. We learned about structure of our government, how elections worked, and even became relatively well-versed as to the content of ALL the Constitutional amendments. Now I live in a state where the senior Senator can't even identify the three branches of government. The devolution of civics education has served to make us collectively less informed and interested in how shit actually works.
Social media, according to Timothy Snyder and others, has had a bigger impact. Intelligence and attention spans have gone down in all of us.
We are more reactive. I see it in my older posts. I have taken steps to counteract.
You touch on it with this notion of "media literacy." Literacy has many levels. There was an article by Resnick and Resnick about it before books like The Bell Curve and Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.
There was that whole thing in the 1980s about the dumbing down of America, which was entirely unscientific. Mostly aging people sensing their own estrangement from the world.
I did some reading and more reflection at the time about what literacy is. And propaganda, the history of public relations and advertising, starting with Edward Bernays.
Now psychology and neuroscience has gone well beyond the cheap tricks still used. We can become aware but never entirely inoculated.
This remains a work in progress. History is also a good focus. Historical literacy and seeing where a text is opinion and not analysis or fact.
I just read Galbraith about the 1929 crash. And How Democracies Die. This is excellent stuff.
Pop quiz: How is our American moment like and unlike Germany when Hitler was elected? Lay out the economic, political, and social differences. Why is it more or less probable the US will descend into such a despotic state? Include something about political violence.
Bonus: compare and contrast (a redundant direction) Hitler and Trump. Touch on age difference, family background, sexuality, drug use, etc.
Bonus: examine the way in which popular culture validates violence as a problem solving method, and the potential effects thereof
Well, as to the artistic angle, Hitler favored oils and watercolors. Trump's a ketchup guy.
*Fifty-Seven Varieties*, 2021 (D. Trump, ketchup and wall tile)
You could call his school "Trump l'oile"!
Major Oof.
Violence is the primary way inequality has been ameliorated in the past
In the interest of The Rectification of the Names, I propose that the office of the President be renamed "Determiner of the Price of Eggs and Gas", to match the popular understanding.
Chief Chicken-botherer and Drill Baby.
I nominate Donald Trump to personally give mouth-to-mouth to every chicken that comes down with bird flu.
Henhouse, I'm in henhouse
And the eggs that break around me thru the week
Seem to scramble like the words I tend to speak
When I'm out reviving chickens mouth-to-beak
Peel yourself off a coupla marks.
Thanks. I'mo donate 'em to that nice man on my phone who promises a 900% match. I'm not really certain how that is different from a regular old match – maybe they strike easier...
Now where is that guy...
Huh. Seems like he's takin' the day off. Musta done real good in the matchstick market the last couple days...
Roy Edroso addresses the Maryland State Education Commission, Curriculum Committee:
That's what has got to be in it. [points vaguely to the southeast] The Capitol dome. It should come to life for every boy. All lighted up too. Boys forget what their country means - By just reading "Land of the Free" in history books. Men forget even more. Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: "I'm free... to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't. I can. And my children will." Boys ought to grow up remembering that.
What about girls?
This is what happens when you get your inspiration from a movie made in 1939. We should just be glad there was no blackface.
Yeah, was gonna say...
Well, never mind what I was gonna say...