amittaizero's Open Salon Blog

'Merican Nationalism

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:08:22 -0400

Vignettes

As 50,000 soldiers, some of whom are friends of mine, wait for the end of their time in Iraq to come to an end and, most likely, their new misadventure in Afghanistan to begin, my colleagues and my family discuss the “end of the war”.

As “The Muslims” prepare to build their victorious hard-on of a community center in New York City and fundamentalist Christians continue to stir the post-presidential election casserole of woeful angst, I prepare to receive my students for my third year of teaching.

Moving into my new classroom, I notice one large American flag hanging on the back wall and two smaller flags mounted onto the whiteboard in the front. Our JROTC cadets installed these flags last year under the direction of the superintendent and, after a decade of absence, the pledge of allegiance is now recited each morning in classrooms across campus. The principals and several teachers continue to berate and punish students who do not partake in the national communion and, since this has begun, I have had to become more careful when I tell my students that they cannot be required to recite one word of the pledge.

One of our JROTC instructors, during a lull between staff meetings, tells me that the Japanese never built a victory monument at Pearl Harbor and I concede his point yet remind him that Islam is not a nation, has no worldwide hierarchy, never made a formal declaration of war and that, among other things, the Japanese lost World War II. Appearances suggest that the United States, a nation that has continually had to order smaller and smaller jockstraps since the end of the Cold War, is neither winning nor losing its war. By virtue of our friendship of a few years he and I agree to disagree,

I know parents who, when reviewing video games their children would like to play, differentiate between “war violence” and any other type of violence. War violence is permissible while criminal violence, in the traditional sense, is not.

Old Spice

The United States, in being one of the first nations truly born out of The Enlightenment, received arguably the two greatest products of the era: nationalism and the notion of civil liberties. The former has remained intact and has only swelled to gargantuan proportions in the intervening years while the latter has become a slogan.

The idea of civil liberties in the United States or, as they are more often called, freedoms, are the towel around the “Old Spice Guy's” waist. They are the cloak in which we wrap ourselves to avoid having to look at our private parts. So long as we wear that towel and, in a more literal sense, so long as we continue to bombastically imbibe the righteousness of our free society in the great bathroom that is planet Earth, we are safe. We are safe to wiggle around until someone pulls off the towel, smells our armpits and realizes that we are not quite what we hold ourselves to be.

Our “freedoms” are only useful to most so long as these “freedoms” can be easily hoisted to the shoulders to tout our greater love for nationalism. If our “freedoms” disappear, I would venture to guess that most Americans, rather than fleeing the country or taking to the streets, would simply attempt to locate another reason for our stout, BBQ-sized boner for the flag.

Number One!

When it is said that we are the greatest democracy in the world and we beat our hairy and white Uncle Sam chests, what is meant is that we are militarily the most bad-ass freedom-loving dudes on the block. When lists are compiled that attempt to isolate the freest nations in the world, America has not, in any research I have seen, taken the #1 spot. Most of the time we are relegated to somewhere between #5 and #10 and, in some cases, even further back than that. I do not mean to say that these surveys are necessarily foolproof or unbiased, but when the greatest democracy on Earth is not perceived as such, then there is a disconnect in viewpoint that is being ignored by one or many parties.

We are the most heavily armed democracy and we are certainly the most warlike democracy, having spent the better part of the 20^th Century laying waste to a small agrarian Asian nation, firebombing a defenseless German city, dragging our feet in The Philippines or throwing the whole of Guatemala into nightmarish chaos for the sake of the American United Fruit Company and their delicious bananas.

When we do chance to see ourselves in the mirror and realize that $49.7 billion has been requested by the Department of Education for FY2011 while the Department of Defense has requested $708.3 billion (this does not take into account supplemental, which in 2010 totaled $33 billion), many of us return to the lovely old bumper-sticker that reads: “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.”

Notes and References:

I am receptive to any criticism or correction of any figures that may be found in this blog – if I have made an error in my assessment of data then I would be thankful for feedback. My aim is only to offer commentary and, if in doing so, I have made errors then I would like to be corrected. If I have offended then I would appreciate if the offended party refrained from name-calling or any other sort of sophomoric behavior.
Perhaps since most school districts rely on local and state funding I should be more careful in being so snarky about this gap in funding. All 50 states and their local districts for FY2010 are listed to have spent a total of $952 billion ($272.5 billion state and $697.7 billion local).
(Reference: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20.html
(Reference: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget_factsheets_departments)

Splice: A Movie Review

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 22:06:33 -0400

Disclaimer: There are two parts to this review, the first is a brief, thematic review without spoilers and the second is more in-depth and contains spoilers (and a lot of useless extra crap).

Spoilerless Review

A noble (or maybe underhanded) attempt at selling a film as a horror flick while it's actually sci-fi/thriller/drama. To be honest, I hate horror movies with a passion that burns like Old Spice in my eyes, so when my wife asked me to go with her I of course consented – but knew that I wasn't in for much. The screenplay is schizophrenic and bounces around between almost 10 different themes, confusing and baffling in between high-points of superb acting and special effects. The movie drags on far too long at the end, becoming an exhausting snore-fest of stock action/horror sequences and losing any soul it may have had. I did learn one important lesson, however, and that is that Sarah Polley is very sexy and very smart. I won't forget that.

HOT

Spoilered Review

Cast of Characters
VINCENZO Natali (Story & Screenplay)
ANTOINETTE Terry Bryant (Story & Screenplay)
DOUG Taylor (Screenplay)

VINCENZO: So, that's it, let's call it a screenplay and get this thing started.

ANTOINETTE: Vincenzo?

VINCENZO: What?

ANTOINETTE: Don't you think the movie should have a few more 'scientists playing God' or 'morally ambiguous experiment' moments? Maybe one of the characters...

VINCENZO: We all ready have several excellent one-liners about the moral implications of...what is it again?

DOUG: Splicing.

VINCENZO: ...splicing, exactly, I mean, it's like a modern Prometheus type of story, we don't need to sell that too much.

ANTOINETTE: I just think it would be really great if we could have a character say something like, 'Should we be doing this? What if it's wrong? Right or wrong? Science? God? Frankenweenie?'

VINCENZO: I love it.

ANTOINETTE: Which character should say it?

VINCENZO: Who cares?

DOUG: I do.

VINCENZO: Shut up Doug, this is our story.

ANTOINETTE: It's edgy – scientists listening to rock music, wearing vests over t-shirts and sporting emo haircuts – no one's ever done anything like this before.

VINCENZO: Do you think Dren being buried is the best place to end the movie?

ANTOINETTE: Of course! What the hell else could we do after that?

VINCENZO: I don't know, it just seems like the audience will expect something else.

ANTOINETTE: Come on, they'll be emotionally exhausted by that point – tacking anything else onto the movie will seem half-assed and cliched.

VINCENZO: I guess you're right.

DOUG: I like the part where Clive and Dren have sex, and then Dren's wings come out, and then her stinger, and then the girl walks in and she's all like...

VINCENZO: Boobs, we have to have boobs in that scene.

ANTOINETTE: I'll make a note of it.

VINCENZO: Well, folks, I think we've got something excellent here.

ANTOINETTE: Should we pack up and go home?

VINCENZO: Sounds good to me.

ANTOINETTE: Do you have a key to lock the room behind us? Are you just going to leave the script on the table?

VINCENZO: Don't worry so much, it'll be fine. It's not like someone's going to come into this room after we're gone, drop acid, pull out some old issues of Penthouse and screw with our script, inserting an extended ending where Dren comes back to life, has a spontaneous and inexplicable sex-change, kills the jackass pencil pusher, kills Clive's brother, pulls Clive into the water, rapes Elsa, is stabbed with a large branch by Clive, comes back to life and kills Clive, is skull-crushed by the woman he/she/it just raped and then dies. We've worked too hard to have a semi-intelligent and almost-thought provoking movie to just end up with a closing shot where Elsa is pregnant with Dren's splice-baby and wants to give birth to it because she's a suddenly-psychotic/money-hungry scientist. No, we'll just leave it unlocked.

A Political Ad Disrupts the Learning Process

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:04:28 -0400

A small Cessna, or maybe something even smaller, buzzes back and forth over the high school campus. I don’t hear it at first because of the fan that I have running, trying to keep my students from melting in the humidity that pours into every corner of the room. The air conditioning system, for what it’s worth, will not be turned on for another week, but here in rural North Carolina, it’s all ready 88 degrees at noon, and the air, though sun drenched, is heavy with water.

I am unfazed by the noise of the engine, and my students seem to be as well, when I do notice it. Being adjacent to a major highway the state and only several hundred yards from a rail line, we are accustomed to the noise of motors.

My back is covered with sweat and my head feels like it’s come into direct contact with a greasy slice of pizza. My wiry, curly, bushy hair even droops, ever so slightly, over one eyebrow. My elbows bend as my hands press into the faux-wood surface of the desk and my eyes fix to the paper in front of me.

Evaluations, provided by the school to students, to assess performance. These evaluations are opinion-based: “Drugs are a problem at my school” or “My teachers provide extra help when I need it”, strongly agree, agree, no opinion, disagree, strongly disagree. There are 30 questions, but the goddamn plane is still buzzing. My students, tediously filling in each bubble with a No. 2 pencil, are judging the condition of their educational environment. There is space on the back for written comments.

In your opinion, what elements make this a good high school?

“IDK”

“Just some off the staff like Mrs. ----- before the idiots let her go…FYI we actually learned alot and she was a GREAT teacher, ask anyone that had her.”

“How things goes on in the school.”

“Nothing cause it’s no way you can fix this school.”

“Nothing does because this high school sucks.”

What suggestions for improvement would you like to share with school leadership?

“Better teacher.”

“During summer online classes let the kids know what’s there test scores again about instead of just putting us in any class so they want have extra work.” (Author's Note: We were recently informed that we have no funding this year for summer courses)

“Better teachers that all”

“Yall truly suck hot air balloons only you can prevent forest fires, Im moving

young Y T out”

These evaluations are anonymous; all that’s required is ethnicity, sex and grade level. They were relentless in their comments, if not in their multiple-choice answers, and for that I’m proud of them.

The plane buzzes once again and a student cracks open the blinds.

“Mr. J., come look at this.”

I shouldn't be able to smell my feet when my head is 5 feet and 8 inches off of the ground, but I do, though I take solace in the fact that perhaps the scent is lost in the bewildering, overwhelming potpourri of a classroom: body odor, skin lotion, old underwear, hair relaxer, hair activator, popcorn?, 20-year-old carpet, whatever is stuck inside the whirring fan of the LCD projector, etc.

I move and lean over the radiator unit, which spans the entire length of one wall and, above which are 6 seamless windows, the blinds drawn over all of them. I crack the peer out, craning my neck and looking up and to the right.

It is a small Cessna and it’s tugging a large gold and green banner behind it, painted onto the banner is a glowering, “Colbert Report”-esque bald eagle and the name of a local politician. A man running as “A True Conservative”. The Cessna he has rented is buzzing a high school that is 85% African-American and with 20% of all students living below the poverty line. A community where 20% of the households are run by single-mothers and the median household income stands at $29,900.

The plane advertises to a high school were the number of suspensions last year per 100 students stood at 108.

Out of our 13 performance targets for AYP (a product of “No Child Left Behind”) we reached none during the 2008-2009 school year. Forty-six percent of our students last year took advantage of the SAT with an average score of 863.

On North Carolina’s End-of-Course examinations last year, 34.5% of our students passed all of their examinations – 57% of our white students and 25.3% of our black students.

My heart races slightly, as I watch the little airplane floating around in the airspace about our school, perhaps due to the amphetamines I have to take for my Narcolepsy, or perhaps something else.

The candidate, who shall remain nameless, is running for Congress. He claims that any attempt to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act would be a violation of the Constitution (it violates general welfare).

He has received two Tea Party endorsements in North Carolina.

He has claimed that President Obama “brings the United States down to a position where we are not only level with the rest of the world, but also subject to subordination and restitution by other nations due to our past sins” and that “we understand why he feels more comfortable agreeing with the despots and dictators of the world rather than our traditional friends and allies.”

My students, most of them, are a-political and could not care less about the airplane. They’ve seen airplanes before. They do not take notice of a man who claims, like many others lately, that education should be in control of the private sector, homeschools and private schools, and that political correctness and the federal government have ruined education.

Am I making his case for him, with these descriptions of the heat, the despair, the loneliness of the teachers and the students? My constant daily fight is perhaps an exercise in futility – and worse, maybe I’m to blame for the Sins of this nation, myself and people like me, we who drive ourselves to school at 6:30 in the morning only to serve indoctrination in the name of a supposed liberal agenda.

Maybe I'm only making myself look like a fool – a fool to believe in public education at all. Oversight, as Ayn Rand has written in her gospels, is diabolical and megalomaniacal.

In spite of my own feelings, this man with his American flag lapel pin, “take back America” and all, pays for his name to dance in the breeze generated by the engines of the aircraft – while below on our campus we are still waiting for cooler air.

“If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.”

~ Susan B. Anthony

Interview with the Echo of America

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:04:06 -0400

I corner her in a corner cafe - a copper-colored amalgamation of notions that fell carelessly out of mouths and came together, like ribs, for her.

Her coffee pulls itself to her lips, effortless and completely independent of her.

“We do not speak Spanish in America,” she says. “Comprende? Most of the time, we do not speak at all, at least not to one another, unless we are shouting. It’s hard to hear here, so we shout.”

The mouth is long cremated, I assume, but the echo rings down the avenue past the hat-man and into the door, looking out, suspicious.

“Me?” She asks, offended. “No, I’m not French, I’ve lived here longer, parts of me were born here, now, added over the years. I’m French-American.”

She says that red is the color of energy and is often, in a polychromous gaggle, the one seen first but forgotten last – it stimulates the appetite.

I ask her where she read that.

“Wikipedia – no, no, I don’t need to check my facts.”

She says that the end is near, it’s a certainty and that there are no “facts” to check – that it is in itself a “fact” and that therefore there are no prerequisite “facts”.

I ask her if she can see the newspaper on the table outside but she won’t stand to check the title.

“This is America,” she says. “Where you cannot separate, from a distance, at least, the Washington Post from the Penny Saver.”

I shake my head and mutter something about willful ignorance.

“I do what I like!” She says.

I tell her that willful ignorance is the antithesis of what it is to be human – a position and a craving for knowledge; intellectual curiosity.

“No, no – human nature? Is that original sin?”

Maybe I said something about fighting willful ignorance being a violation of conscience – a persistent effort to destroy ones humanity in order to preserve ones hubris and beliefs.

“No, no – this is America, to be an American one has to wage a constant war of attrition against ones own conscience, or it doesn’t work.”

Soon she’ll ask me where I go to church and then someone will tell me that God has a plan for me. When I ask them which God they mean, they do not seem to know His name.

The South Will Rise Again

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 10:04:38 -0400

Abner Lee Snow, if I imagine him, must have possessed the t-bone shaped facial structure that typifies both myself, his great-great-grandson, and my grandmother, his granddaughter – that is, the cheeks forming the top of the 'T' and the chin and teeth forming the base. My father's nervous, sad brown eyes, if Abner would ever have had them, would have been quick and uncertain.

It is early June in 1863 in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the loosely organized Confederate States of America. The Federal Army withdrew from the area around Chancellorsville in retreat almost a month ago and the city of Richmond is still picking up the pieces. Abner Lee Snow, my great-great-grandfather, has come to a dilapidated military hospital to collect his brother, Frost Snow.

The entire South is waking up today, April 10 2010, as I write this. Some are hungover from the flag-waving and flag-planting that took place yesterday at Confederate graves, wherever they may lie, across the former states of the rebellious union that was dissolved 145 years ago.

Southerners, especially young men, are raised from an early age on the stories of the Civil War, and, contrary to popular belief, that is what we call it (no “War Between the States” or “War of Northern Aggression” around here). By my count, on both sides of my lineage, I have 6 ancestors who served in the Confederate Army during the conflict. This is a point that grandparents bring up often, a point of pride. I am unaware of many nations where a formerly rebellious section so proudly and unabashedly celebrates its failed rebellion, especially 145 years after the fact. Oh yes, those gray and brown uniforms, hodge-podge, rag-tag rebels fighting for their homeland – the South. Martin Sheen and Patrick Swayze have portrayed us well in films – dashing fellows, no, they didn't want to go to war, but damned if they didn't give it their all once they arrived. Huzzah!

Abner Lee Snow was born to Richard Snow and Sally Tucker Snow in 1843 in Surry County, North Carolina. Surry County is best known by its most famous resident, Andy Griffith, and the town of Mt. Airy, where Griffith grew up, which became the basis for Mayberry in Griffith's TV sitcom. Surry County was then and is still a very rural, foothills community, dominated by the looming presence of Pilot Mountain, a bizarre monadnock that seems to, by will alone, have pulled itself 1,500 feet out of the green, rolling hills and into the sky.

By the time Abner enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 he had 11 siblings – 7 brothers and 4 sisters. Four of his brothers would enlist along with him. In Company C of the 21^st NC Infantry there were 4 Snow brothers: Thomas, Abner, Frost and Byrd. Another brother, James, was serving in the 28^th NC.

Southern culture, it seems by nature alone, is martial. The former states of the Confederacy must have decided, whether by purpose or coincidence, to form a tiny, drawling Sparta for the United States. Fort Bragg, Fort Jackson, Camp Lejeune, Parris Island and Fort Benning spread across three states alone – North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. You would be hard pressed to find a native Southerner who doesn't, by default, support most, if not all military action, taken by the United States, especially in the past 10 years. Maybe it's the humidity.

I was raised visiting battlefields, cemeteries, monuments, museums, to be fair, though, I sought all these things out. The impression, though, was hard to deny, especially as a child.
Why did we lose?
How could we lose?
It wasn't really about slavery, was it?
Oh, what I would have given to go back in time and lie about my age, enlist like all those boys I read about in lavishly illustrated, glossy-covered books.

Abner Lee Snow, I'm not sure how, procures the lifeless shell of his brother, Frost. Abner is 20 years old. Frost was 23. Frost had been wounded at the Battle of 2^nd Manassas in 1862 and had survived, returning to duty after a short time. As the 21^st NC Infantry was called into battle at Chancellorsville on May 3 1863, Frost was wounded again, most likely in sight of his three brothers serving in Company C with him. Later that same day at Chancellorsville, Byrd was also wounded – being hit in the arm, the limb had to be amputated soon thereafter – but he survived. Frost, however, lingered in a military hospital in Richmond until June 5 1863, when he died. Abner, without his other brothers from Company C, visits the hospital, to collect Frost's remains. Abner Lee Snow carefully packs his brother's body into a box and secures him tightly with fistfuls of sawdust for the trip back to Surry County where he will be buried on the family farm. Once Frost's remains are shipped, Abner Lee Snow returns to his unit. Frost had never married.

We, like all boys, played at 'war' in the woods behind our grandparent's homes. My grandfathers' both served briefly in the military in the mid-50s, one in the Air Force, the other in the Army. I was, by all accounts and my own memory, a very mild-mannered, curious, bookish young boy, but I knew my lineage, the lineage of the South, and never lost the draw to the military, to some sort of ethereal notion of glory, of service, patriotic duty. After several lies of omission about my past health issues, both physical and mental, I enlisted in the Army after graduating from college.

The Snow brothers, now Byrd, Thomas and Abner, of Company C, move on from Chancellorsville through Gettysburg and Cold Harbor to Hatcher's Run, Virginia. Byrd has now been promoted to the rank of Captain – Thomas and Abner now serve under him. Company C lost two men during Hatcher's Run, one of which was Byrd, who left behind a wife but no children.

My medical past, and my academic disposition and pacifistic nature, all catch up to me at Fort Benning, Georgia during basic training in the summer of 2007. Deceived by the notion that anyone, even a quiet, bookish young man, can become a soldier, my mind breaks down and I am discharged. Disgraced. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Unsure, for the first time in my life, of who I am.

Thomas and Abner Lee Snow, the two surviving brothers from Company C, return home to Surry County at the end of the war. Their return is quiet and they resume, as best they can, their lives. Abner marries in December of 1865 and eventually has 7 children, one of which is my great-grandfather. Abner dies at the age of 53. Thomas dies in 1904 at the age of 78.

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton