Knowledge Is Power

For about a year some of us have been trying to talk the City Council in Healdsburg into an ordinance that would require the gathering of information on the impact on the community of any large new property development. The big business majority on the council has dug in its heels, rejecting information. For a while this attitude baffled me. But then I noticed that Republicans on a national level were opposed to a health insurance exchange (a place where coverages and costs of different health insurance plans could be easily compared).

What it boils down to is this. The Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for ordinary citizens to compare one health plan to another; they want to make it difficult for ordinary people to gather facts about the impacts of a new property development. The less information available, the easier it will be to control the outcome.

Knowledge isn't always power. Just before the start of the second war against Iraq, many of us knew from UN reports that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but we couldn't stop the carnage. Sometimes, though, knowledge helps. The Republicans understand that. That's why they systematically block attempts to gather facts.

Escape From Freedom

In its March issue HARPER'S reports on the brutal murders of Salah Ahmed Al-Slami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybe and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani at our secret Camp No in Guantanamo. We should try to remember their names. None of them had been charged with a crime. All had been eligible for early release. The Bush regime hid the murders by calling them suicides. The Obama administration has declined to investigate.

I mention this to illustrate why Americans ranging from Teabaggers to Greens to unaffiliated citizens no longer trust what the government says. A recent poll found that 86% of Americans believe that their government no longer works. We do not expect our government to do the right thing. We expect to be lied to. This set of public expectations is relatively new in America, new in my lifetime, although similar beliefs were once common in 20th century dictatorships.

Who are these people who no longer believe in our government? We see oddballs on the fringes who are as paranoid as Dick Cheney on acid, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about myself. Ask yourself. Have you been lied to? Do you expect the governments of America and California to do the right thing? What about the governments of Sonoma County or of our towns? Will they demonstrate something approaching common sense?

The assumption that a body of elected American representatives might exhibit common sense makes me smile--it seems absurd. But I hope there are occasions when it happens.

Contemporary life is confusing and relativistic at best. Each of us has countless decisions to make based on incomplete information. We might begin as Catholics and end as Protestants. We know we can't trust our elected leaders or our cultural leaders, who often speak from ignorance--I'm thinking of Noam Chomsky chastising tribal people in Central America because they'd voted for candidates he hadn't approved.

There is a way out, of course. That's what the teabaggers and Stalinists are about. If you want to be free from anxiety, adopt a set of absolutes (of the right or of the left) that induce black-and-white thinking. Fanaticism soothes the fanatic . . . as long as she manages to squelch the relativism lurking somewhere inside, as Berger and Zijderveld point out in a recent book, IN PRAISE OF DOUBT.

We understand this much: we know why people become dogmatic. They choose not to be free.

--Gary Goss

The Day the Music Died

I enjoy the way people write about music, so I saved this introduction, written by the composer, from a recent concert:

Welcome to the world premier of MOTHRA, a mixture of various elements of ancient rubbish. I was inspired to write the MOTHRA symphony by tales of the ancient creature, a moth the size of an aircraft carrier, that date back to some time ago in post-Zoroastrian Asia. The MOTHRA belief system, of course, continues to develop in areas that range as far as Sierra Madre and Sweden.

Mothraism, in its long and varied history, influenced the traditions of Buddhism, Shintoism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, where Mothra is represented as "a great speckled bird." With her 20,000 eyes, seven noses and one ear, the giant moth was considered an all-seeing god who smelled a lot but didn't hear what you said under your breath.

The MOTHRA symphony was composed as one continuous movement in three sections. The first begins quite slowly with a solo flute. The second is slower, a restful interval featuring an Alpine horn, while the final section is the slow part, consisting of three notes played on a harp at 12 minute intervals. The harp was inspired by traditional uses of Irish drums.

Enjoy.

Arne Duncan, Rebounder

I support Obama. I don't expect him to understand public education. He's never worked as an elementary school teacher. He hasn't spent a career trying to puzzle out how children learn. His comments on education have been conventional.

Obama named Arne Duncan as his secretary of education. Duncan has credentials. He headed up the Chicago public schools, about which I know nothing. Perhaps they are wonderfully successful. Even better, Duncan is about six and a half feet tall and has played basketball with Obama for many years, feeding him the ball. Arne Duncan is the hero's best friend.

Now Duncan has instituted a new federal program called "Race to the Top" (note the competitive sports metaphor).

Under Race to the Top, a state will qualify for a small bit of federal education money if it meets certain requirements. Basically Duncan wants to tie an individual teacher's pay to his or her student scores on standardized tests. Duncan wants a race. There are two problems with this approach: it will continue to reward teaching to the standardized test rather than reward exploration and creative thinking; and few teachers will want to take a pay cut after leading a classroom of students with weak test-taking skills, inadequate English language mastery, or the kind of gnawing hunger and worry that takes a student's eyes off the page.

In any circumstance, most teachers would opt to teach the educationally gifted. It's easier and more fun. Under Duncan, the easiest teaching would draw the highest pay.

If you bench Duncan the Rebounder, you could ask what is at the heart of America's educational problems? You can start with the usual list--little respect or pay for teachers, parental indifference, cultural anti-intellectualism, racism, decrepit buildings and materials, denatured subject matter--and go on to basic information about how children learn. How long will it take us to grasp that each child learns, one at a time, in a different way? A room with 30 children in it is not a factory floor. It holds 30 different learning styles.

The race Duncan plans will not move education forward. He doesn't get it. He thinks he's in the Sweet Sixteen when he's really playing HORSE.

POWER vs. Obama

The founders of the USA had reason to fear governmental power; the precaution they took to avoid tyranny was to divide power among six groups: the voters, the states, the presidency, the senate, the house and the supreme court. In time the presidency became the most powerful segment. That's why we used to capitalize the name. Under George W. Bush the president seemed able to do almost anything he wanted, even defy the voters. Why hasn't Obama been able to enact health care?

It might be Bush's nearly totalitarian power was an illusion. He (and the house, senate and supreme court) looked powerful because each worked for the same entity, the tireless Corporate Lobby. An elected official who works for the Corporate Lobby will look effective. His bills will pass. An official who bucks the Lobby will look ineffectual and weak. His bills will fail.

In other words, our current system is nothing like the system the nation's founders envisioned. It did not occur to them that a Corporation was a person, and what a giant person. . . . Imagine a giant with enough money to fund every election campaign in the country, enough money to buy the major news and entertainment outlets, a giant with enough lawyers to write our laws (and then hand them over to elected officials to enact).

That's power.

American politics tends to be fought over issues the Corporate Lobby ignores: the Lobby doesn't care about choice or don't ask/don't tell. The Lobby doesn't care if Christmas trees are erected in town squares or not. From the point of view of the Lobby, those are issues to distract the rubes who don't understand that the point of life is to amass personal wealth. Keeping divisive issues alive is good politics for the Lobby, of course. The Lobby wants the voters looking in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the Lobby will write our financial laws and send them to congressional committees to pass.

***

Once I understood that Obama, Pelosi and Reid were not the most powerful people in Washington, I had a sense of why Obama had attempted to attract Corporate Lobby support for a health bill. When you lack power, you try to get the real center of power to work with you. If you don't win the backing of the Lobby, you will, in most cases, fail.

The Corporate Lobby rules us in the areas it finds useful. It has made discussion of this fact more or less taboo. But perhaps we are beginning to notice the Lobby--and like a vampire it will burn when exposed to sunlight.

If you need a reference point, consider what happened when a Corporation decided it wanted to build a resort in the Saggio Hills.

Gary Goss