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.

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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

Can Democracy Survive the Voters?

I read about this initiative in the February HARPER'S.

The initiative will be on the ballot in the City and County of Denver in August. It was signed by 4,211 voters. (I've left out several paragraphs to make it shorter.)

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The People of the City and County of Denver hereby declare that:

--The presence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings and vehicles on Earth, and within Earth's atmosphere, has been confirmed by credible evidence, official government documents, and whistleblowers formerly working for the U.S. government;

--Evidence of extraterrestrial beings has been known by U.S. presidents (sic) since President Franklin Roosevelt, including President Ronald Reagan as disclosed in his presentation to the United Nations regarding extraterrestrial matters;

--The United States Government has suppressed, and withheld from the public, evidence of advanced clean energy, transportation, and other technologies of extraterrestrial origin. These technologies could potentially offer substantial economic relief for our most pressing social and economic concerns, including a reduction of pollution and at least partial replacement of fossil fuels with affordable non-polluting energy sources, and other advanced technologies. . . .

Etc.

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The above is an example of the opposite of paranoia. I doubt if it is listed in the DSM, a compendium of our approved mental illnesses, but I did see someone refer to it, many years ago, as "proanoia." It's the belief that everyone is out to help you, or at least that imaginary aliens want to save us from ourselves.

Gary Goss

Anger

When I was a child the news was 15 minutes of facts. Today the news lasts all day, and whether it is Amy Goodman (soul of integrity) or Fox News (soulless idiocy), the news is bad. It enrages people. Good news is not news. As Bob Boardman points out, if you are part of a group that has accomplished something positive, you will seldom be covered.

Politics is a place where people can freely vent their anger, whatever its origin. Then they can stay mad all day.

If you need to vent anger, in the political news each day there will be a series of terrible crimes to enrage and justify you. For starters, there is, on this planet, always a genocide in progress, beginning with the sack of Troy.

Look at the anger in the Massachusetts election. Fundamentalist Christians were so mad that they endorsed a candidate who had paraded his photographed privates in a national magazine. Teabaggers were so enraged at deficits that they supported the party that had created the deficits. Some liberals were so committed to the public option in health care that they voted for the candidate who had promised to block health care, leaving thousands of poor people to die each year.

Consider the rage at Obama, coming from the Angry Right and Angry Left, blaming one mild-mannered man for the mess we're in.

In the worst of times, the mild (and ignorant) center of the country usually puts aside its distaste for the angry political classes just long enough to prevent catastrophe. During the last Bush regime, which was close to totalitarian, when it seemed Bush could do anything he (or Dick Cheney?) decided, including start unjust wars, the center blocked an attempt to turn social security over to Wall Street. Bush never recovered. But in Massachusetts the center did not hold.

The Left can not hope to win an election without unity or without the Center. We had better learn to work together. It might help if we turn off the TV Bad News, stop using politics as an arena for the expression of personal rage, and instead focus on the good that we can do. (But that lacks the appeal of the cleansing denunciation of the dude across the street whose politics are an inch different from yours in exactly the wrong way.)

El Supremo

Last night the Peace Project was talking about the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to strengthen the ludicrous fiction that corporations are people. The Peace Project expects problems. For one thing, now that corporations are people, they can marry (unless they are gay). For another, the American Constitution makes it illegal to own a person; as of today our corporations have no owners. And what if Republicans start several more pointless wars and corporations get drafted?

"Obama Has Done Nothing."

Well, perhaps not quite nothing. In one year Obama did overturn a prohibition on federal funding for stem-cell research and let people with HIV travel to the United States. Let's see--he also started closing the prison at Gitmo, banned torture, eased a few restrictions on Cuba, pulled out of combat in Iraq, added troops in Afghanistan, pushed the idea that the government is responsible for health care, pledged to cut American emissions, promoted the first Latina to the Supreme Court, stalled a worldwide Great Depression (we hope), opened dialogues with Russia and the Moslem world, set aside large tracts of wilderness, etc.

Why People Are Nuts (1)

In a poll, Michael Shermer asked people two questions: Why do you believe in God? & Why do other people believe in God? Those polled explained that they believed in God for logical reasons. There had to be a First Cause--something had created the universe. Then they explained that other people believed in God because it was comforting and customary. In other words, my beliefs are based on reason and yours are based on emotion. This is a persistent bias--I am a Progressive for logical reasons, and you are a Teabagger because you are an animal. (Hume pointed out that logic provides no motivation; what motivates us in every case is emotion.)

THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE

THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi is a book about a serial killer in Italy (the prototype for Hannibal the Cannibal)--or rather the true story of conspiracy theories about the Monster and how they ruined many lives. Innocent people went to prison. It's a vividly written book, and near the end the two journalists get accused of related crimes and wrapped into the conspiracy theories by certain balmy police and prosecuters. In Italy people get convicted and sentenced to long terms in prison on the bases of conspiracy theories (and no evidence). That is what happened recently to a young American woman, Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend.

Of course that sort of thing can occur in America, too. The McMartin preschool witch hunt, part of the Satanic-ritual/recovered memory hysteria in our own recent past, lasted for six years before the accused were finally exonerated and released. Let's hope that Amanda Knox gets that lucky.

Meanwhile I read on the net that President Obama is responsible for the internal unrest in Iran. I am getting used to nutty conspiracy theories about Obama from the Right, but this one comes from the Left, from people who claim that Obama is "worse than Bush" and call the President a "scumbag." This sort of thing is not harmless. Conspiracy theories--whether about FDR or Bush or Obama--harm everyone, harm their victims and harm the causes of the delusional people who promote them.

Gary Goss