Carl Brutananadilewski on Mangino

Umm...

1. Huckabee brings out Chuck Norris for ad

"..." 13

"There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that "the crowd" received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in."

—Søren Kierkegaard

"..." 12

“If you’re robbing a bank, and your pants suddenly fall down, I think it’s OK to laugh, and to let the hostages laugh too, because come on, life is funny.”

—Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

As it continues, the Iraq War takes its toll

From the UDK today:

I’m terrible with birthdays. I remember only three: My dad’s, my wife’s and my son’s.

My son’s is easy for two reasons: I’ll never forget the rainy morning we brought him home and I pondered how anyone could be so small and fragile; and, he was born the day the war started in Iraq.

Being a veteran, this connection started pulling at me immediately, especially when I realized I was the same age as the average soldier serving on the front lines in World War II. The difference between the average age of a World War II soldier, 27, and the average age of a soldier in Vietnam, 20, is one factor explaining a high occurrence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam veterans. The argument holds that a 27-year-old, which happens to be the average age of a casualty in Iraq, is better equipped, psychologically, to handle war. Currently the average age for military members is 25. The average age of a soldier in Iraq could be lower, since the average infantry soldier is only 19.

Another difference between World War II and Vietnam that may contribute to a high occurrence of P.T.S.D. is the time served in combat zones. World War II soldiers experienced about 60 days of combat spread through a few years while an average Vietnam soldier saw 240 to 300 days of combat in a single year.

In the Iraq War, preliminary numbers indicate a routine similar to Vietnam. Around 50 percent of the servicemen in Iraq are on their second tour and 25 percent are on their third. This many deployments can easily add up to years away from home for soldiers. If a child was born around the time of their deployment, those soldiers would miss out on practically every major event of the child’s early development—their first words, first steps and if it had been me on my second 18 month tour, I would have missed my son’s first day of preschool.

Up to 90 percent of the soldiers in Iraq have been in a fire fight because, unlike in World War II, there are no front lines. Fighting can happen anywhere.

Dustin Crook, a KU junior, fought in Iraq for a year when he was 20. He provided security to convoys going in and out of Iraq from Kuwait. He said attacks were sporadic, with numerous close calls happening in one month and then a month or two with none. The attacks included 10 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and numerous small arm and rocket propelled grenade fire fights. He said overall he experienced 10 “really close calls.”

Crook was diagnosed with P.T.S.D when he returned from Iraq and simple activities, such as driving or smelling red meat as it cooks, began to trigger emotional episodes. This caused him anxiety at friendly barbecues when he suddenly thought of dead bodies.

The Pentagon’s current troop deployment policy deviates from a long standing, informal policy of giving soldiers two months home for every one month in combat, according to Larry Korb, former assistant secretary of defense. He said by not honoring this “social contract,” our country is failing to fulfill its moral obligation to its soldiers.

Korb said the Iraq War has depleted military resources and manpower, undermining efforts against terrorism elsewhere such as on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself.

He said the War on Terror should not include occupations of countries as large as Iraq and America should either get a bigger force or not wage war. Korb said a military draft would be one way to solve the problem.

When the war started, I chose not to rejoin the military because I wanted my son to grow up with a father in his life. But now, my son and the war Donald Rumsfeld said would take only six weeks are both going on five year and I wonder if losing my son to a military draft in 14 years is becoming a plausible fear. President Bush said the War on Terror will take years, which if you apply the Rumsfeld coefficient equates to us fighting terrorism for decades. Factoring in that the Iraq War may be undermining the true War on Terror and that tensions are rising with Iran, I’m left wondering: Will my four-year-old son get drafted?

Foster is a Lawrence junior in journalism and creative writing.

Drawings of Darfur

1. Human Rights Watch - Darfur Drawings

Philosophical splurgings (aphorisms)

Something fundamental is left out with that which is poetry for the sake of being poetic, or that which is art for the sake of being artful.

There's nothing easier than philosophy. It ultimately boils down to the obvious or the dogmatic.

Ethics as an inquiry is strictly functional. You first ask what you want and then develop the best means to achieve them.

There is no such thing as "objective" ethics. It's a blatant contradiction.

We're in no position to contemplate ultimate ends; our vantage point won't permit it.

The question of Good and Evil is too reliant on ontological categories to be tenable. If you remove the ontology from our language, you'd soon wonder what it was that was ever being asked about it.

Subjectivity is simply a perspective on the world. (A microcosm.)

What separates ethics and wanton preferences is the articulation of reason. Mutually shared "ends" are the only things that lend ethics credibility.

"De gustibus non est disputandum." That's all you ever need know about aesthetics.

Education is necessarily biased. Constraints on time and subject content guarantee this.

Masterpieces of Modern Art

Robert Ryman. Twin. 1966.


Robert Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953.


Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970.


Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1960-61.


Shigeko Kubota. Vagina Painting (Performance). 1965.


Yves Klein. Blue Monochrome. 1961.


Piero Manzoni. Artist's Shit. 1961. (Manzoni does a fantastic job of relating his work to that of his contemporaries.)

FreeRice

FreeRice is a wonderful idea— it's a vocabulary building game that uses advertisement revenue from page-views and donates those directly to the UN World Food Program. Since it first went online in October it has raised enough money to feed over 50,000 people for one day. If you want to improve your vocabulary while simultaneously helping the hungry you should definitely check it out.

1. FreeRice
2. BBC News - Web game provides rice for hungry
3. Wikipedia - FreeRice

The Six Traits of Writing

There's a common practice in public schools (and also, unfortunately, in my C&T 100 class) of creating lists of considerations relevant to a particular topic and presenting these as if they were themselves facts. Sometimes these are presented as the # ____ of something, or in a goal-oriented fashion as the # steps to better ______.

There was a passage from Jonathon Kozol's The Shame of the Nation that caught my interest on this topic (my emphasis):

     Educators who have read parts of this book in preparation have observed that certain of the highly formalized vocabularies that accompany the programs I've described, as well as the various lists and charts that break down cognitive activities into unusually tiny units that seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me, have their origins in academic work on learning theory on the part of scholars who would not be likely to approve of the constricting ways in which their work has often been applied.
     During one of my visits to P.S. 65, for instance, Mr. Endicott directed my attention to a poster on the wall, headed by the three words "Understanding by Design," which broke down the act of understanding into several elements that teachers were to emphasize in a specific sequence. ("Explanation," "Application," and "Empathy" were three of them. There were six in all, but I did not have time to write the others.) I remember thinking it was odd to be so confident about our knowledge of one of the greatest mysteries of life as to believe that we can subdivide the act of understanding into six established categories and then post these on the wall as a reminder to the students. I still think it's odd. The notion that there really are "six elements of understanding" does not seem believable to me.
     I mentioned this once during a seminar with educators and was told that this idea had been developed by a highly admired specialist in curriculum design who had described these elements as "the Six Facets of Understanding." I was cautioned not to be dismissive of a concept that is seen by teacher-educators as a helpful way of giving future teachers a schematic tool for thinking about education in the elementary grades. I felt reproved; I didn't like the feeling that I'd inadvertently been disrespectful of a scholar who, they told me, would not like to be identified with the rigidity and absoluteness that this classroom seemed to typify.
     The problem for me, I realized later, wasn't the theory as a framework for reflection among teachers but the way this theory had been concretized into six items posted on a wall, as if they were as scientific as the items on a periodic table. It struck me as a way of locking-down a child's capability for thinking rather than an aperture for understanding.
     On the wall of a fifth grade class in Seattle's Thurgood Marshall School the year that I first visited, there was a list of 44 sentences describing the proficiencies of language arts that children must achieve to be considered Level Threes. "I am proficient," according to one of these sentences, "in considering the six traits of writing so I can improve my work before I share it."
     Intrigued to find the number six appearing once again, I asked the teacher, "What are the 'six traits'?"
     She said she had them written down and could find them for me but could not remember all six at the time.
     I asked, "Why do you teach this?"
     The teacher answered that it was required for a writing test the class would have to take. When I later was provided with the list, I thought that most of the items it contained made reasonable sense ("good organization," "correct conventions," and "sound ideas" were three of them), although I couldn't help but notice that no credit would be given to a child for original ideas or for originality of style. The list was practical, and probably innocuous, but calling these "the six traits"—rather than six items someone had selected for convenience out of an innumerable number of such traits—was obviously arbitrary. The numbers made it possible for state examiners to judge a child's offerings empirically and not to have to look at other attributes, like charm or humor or sincerity or, on the reverse side, dutiful banality, which is unhappily the usual result of this kind of instruction.

"Why We Need to Raise Hell"

By Jack E. White

Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it. Instead, for the past 40 years, we played a shell game with desegregation in which blacks chased after whites who would not stand still long enough to be integrated with. The result: public schools so separate and vastly unequal that Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown v. Board, might as well be the law of the land.

This sorry situation is, to be sure, mostly the fault of whites who pay lip service to equal rights but cut and run as soon as enough blacks move into their neighborhood. But many privileged African Americans are no more committed to public school integration than their white counterparts if it means sending their children to class with poor black kids. The main obstacle to integration is not race but class.

In fact, there is a good deal of integration going on among those who can afford it. Consider the small number of schools, both public and private, where something approaching stable integration exists. What most have in common is an affluent clientele and a determination to maintain a diverse student body. The well-educated black parents who can afford to send their kids to private school--or to live in one of the expensive areas with a good public system--are accustomed to dealing with whites as equals. Their well-scrubbed, well-dressed, well-mannered offspring blend right in with the well-scrubbed, well-mannered white children and pose no perceived threat.

Moreover, these "safe" black children are always in a very distinct minority. There are enough of them for blacks to feel they are not just tokens but not so many that whites feel uneasy. The poor kids who attend such schools are charity cases, gifted children carefully selected to make sure they fit in.

It amounts to a cynical bargain. White parents congratulate themselves for doing the racial right thing at no real cost to themselves. Affluent blacks get the assurance that their children will learn to get along in the white world in which they will someday compete and the status that goes with sending them to a prestigious school. Most poor black children, meanwhile, are stuck in decrepit ghetto classrooms.

What is truly dismaying about all this is the degree to which privileged African Americans--including myself--have acquiesced to the process. Just like many whites, a lot of us walked away from the fight for school integration once we made sure our own progeny would receive its undeniable benefits by enrolling them in high-priced private academies. This hypocritical approach reflects the desire to seek the best for one's own and frustration with recalcitrant whites. But it also undercuts our ability to prevail on whites to support public school integration. Why should they do what we are unwilling to do ourselves?

In cities such as Washington, it is not uncommon for black school administrators and teachers to enroll their children in private or suburban schools. If the city schools are not good enough for their offspring, they are not good enough for Chelsea Clinton or anyone else. By mismanaging the schools, the black professionals who run them have betrayed the best of the African-American tradition, which values education above all else, and have given whites who never believed in integration an easy excuse for abandoning it.

Herewith a radical proposal for breaking the impasse: revive the civil rights movement, which went into limbo long before some of its most important goals were accomplished, and aim it not only at racist whites but also at complacent middle-class blacks. All of us need a jolting reminder that integration's real purpose was not to produce Norman Rockwellish racial brotherhood. It was a strategy to ensure that black children, especially poor ones, would receive the same quality of instruction, textbooks and facilities that white children do. The genteel race mixing that goes on among the elite is no substitute for a determined national effort to include poor nonwhite children in America's bounty--and if it takes a new round of sit-ins to put the issue back on the national agenda, so be it.

Such a campaign would be disruptive and strongly opposed, but then so was the battle to desegregate lunch counters. America has never made progress on racial issues unless there was enough agitation to force society to take action. Just as it did in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court is again defending the racial status quo--and it always will in the absence of intense political pressure.

Black economist Glenn C. Loury makes a powerful case for the rediscovery of black racial honor. He believes progress toward racial equality depends on acknowledging and rectifying the dysfunctional behaviors in the black community. This is usually taken to mean the underclass must clean up its act before it can move into the mainstream. But there are dysfunctional behaviors outside the ghetto that could also stand re-examination: the white notion that the country has already done enough to secure racial equity, and black middle-class complicity in the deterioration of inner-city schools. In both cases, honor depends on rediscovering our commitment to treating all children fairly. If it takes new turmoil to bring that about, that is a price we should be willing to pay.

1. Why We Need to Raise Hell - Time