Bill Ayers

President Obama “issued a fervent call to arms” at the UN yesterday, according to the New York Times, as he “charted a muscular new course for the [US] in a turbulent world.”

Oy! That doesn’t sound good.

And it gets worse: “Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition.”

Recalls the days? It sounds like ancient history unless you replay the entire American experience up through yesterday, or turn your attention to Israel’s brutal assault on the people of Palestine. (Incidentally, this is difficult to keep straight: is Israel still a US client, or has the US become Israel’s miserable but smiling lap dog?)

President Obama reaches further: The brutality of the terrorists “forces us to look into the heart of darkness.”

He’s gone completely off the rails here, and I suggest he reread the Heart of Darkness and dig a little deeper into its significance then as well as its meaning for us today.

Marlowe observes at the outset the fierce reality of imperial conquest: “They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind. . . .”

The despicable and homicidal acts of a band of zealous terrorists should not be allowed to wipe clean our collective consciousness of the wicked international system that underlies the tumultuous and roiling world we inhabit.

Marlowe discovers in due course that everything he’d been taught to fear and loath about Africa, all the white supremacist logic and assumptions were actually deep inside the Europeans themselves. The horror, the sickness, the heart of darkness, is us.

That’s Joseph Conrad’s entire point.

Graphic novels are part of the wildly diverse, wacky, and rich gumbo of our culture. If you were teaching a history class today on the Holocaust in Europe, you would mobilize memoir (Ann Frank, Elie Wiesel) essay (Hannah Arendt, Thodor Adorno), and film (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity) to help students get a deep and meaningful, nuanced and complex picture of the entire sweep of the times and events. To leave out Maus would be to banish a fresh and intimate work that adds immeasurably to our overall understanding of the Holocaust.

Dykes to Watch out For is an essential text if you hope to understand the Clinton/Bush years. On and on and on: teachers integrate poetry and literature, art and science, film and painting into everything they teach.

Why not comics?

I teach a writing class on memoir, and I use Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Epileptic along with Homage to Catalonia and Black Boy. Students respond variously, but I would be irresponsibly narrowing their horizons if I left out the comic books.

Captain Underpants tops the banned comics list, and coming in at number 10 is Bone, my oldest grand daughter’s favorite series. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s brilliant coming of age novel from Iran makes the cut. A couple years ago Rahm Emmanuel’s school beauracrats banned Persepolis from Chicago Public Schools. A phone call to the private school Rahm’s kids attend revealed that there are 9 copies in the library there, 2 in the original French. All seventh graders read the book—they get real art and real literature while CPS kids are sentenced to another period of drill and kill.

READ BANNED BOOKS!

Read: Educating for Insurgency by Jay Gillen from AK Press—another book not to be missed.

It’s brilliantly conceived and beautifully written—easily the most perceptive and useful book on education for freedom I’ve read in years.

Jay Gillen offers insights and revelations on every page, but it’s the heart of his argument that warrants closest attention: in the long and sorry history of race and class and caste in America, we have resolved nothing and progressed little. He uncovers the stench of the slave market in every corner of modern schools for the descendants of formerly enslaved people, and he plots an insurgency and a powerful pathway out of bondage.

To be a slave is to be measured and assessed, inspected and counted, evaluated and regulated, admonished and corrected, indoctrinated and reformed, threatened and prodded and punished. It’s to have one’s agency ignored or constrained or systematically crushed. To be free is to overthrow that condition through self-activity, an insurgency that involves seizing and practicing one’s own agency, stepping into history not as an object—a fraction of a human, or 3/5 of a person—not as a label or a collection of deficits or someone else’s imposed statistical profile, but as a fully realized and three-dimensional human being.

Gillen illuminates the fundamental goal of education—enlightenment and liberation—in masterful detail. To deny people an authentic education is to distort meaning and destroy freedom; to alienate people from their own judgments is to turn them into objects; to prevent people from naming their situations and entanglements and predicaments is a form of cruelty and violence.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand on the deepest level the educational catastrophe we are experiencing, and the corridors toward a hopeful and more human future for students and families and teachers—and, indeed, for all of us.

Educating for Insurgency is finally an offering of wisdom and an act of love.

http://www.akpress.org/educating-for-insurgency.html

After encountering the lively little anarchist in John and Jana’s delightful A Rule is To Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy, I will always remember the playful little devil with a mind of her own. A children’s book on anarchy seems somehow just right: an instinctive, intuitive sense of fairness, community, and interdependence sits naturally enough with a desire for participatory democracy, self-determination, and peace and global justice.

http://listverse.com/2014/05/09/10-beloved-childrens-books-banned-for-stupid-reasons/

Charles Dickens published Hard Times in London in 1854, over 160 years ago. In the opening paragraphs, he describes – with raging fidelity – the first harsh lesson drummed into the heads of unsuspecting new teachers:

“’Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!’ …

“The speaker, and the schoolmaster … swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.”

This fraught description of 19th-century English schooling sounds weirdly resonant, curiously close at hand, quite a lot like the school-world we teachers face right here, right now. One would think that education and schooling in a modern contemporary “democracy” should look remarkably different from the tyrannical classrooms of Great Britain under the rule of Queen Victoria. Monarchies, after all, demand fealty first and foremost, while democracies, at least theoretically, are built on the active engagement and participation of a free and enlightened people. And since schools—no matter where or when—are always mirror and window into whatever social order that created and sustains them, we can easily imagine what society those “imperial gallons of facts” were meant to maintain and reproduce. What’s harder to reconcile is the oddly familiar feeling of that autocratic classroom picture—and the brute logic behind it—in our own contemporary classroom contexts.

Charles Dickens’ introduction of the severe schoolmaster in Hard Times appears in a chapter appropriately entitled “The Murder of Innocents,” which constitutes a kind of meditation on the dangers of imagination and freedom, “self and the imaginary,” to men without ethics, those who are drunk on power, facts, and order. Dickens shows us the degradation and fear that always marks the classroom as slave galley—a place of standardization and hierarchy, dogma and static, established truths—where the teacher’s central task is to beat the drum mindlessly.

Dickens himself turns at last to the schoolmaster with this indictment: “When thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!”

In this riveting book, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz decolonizes American history and illustrates definitively why the past is never very far from the present. Exploring the border-lands between action and narration—between what happened and what is said to have happened—Dunbar-Ortiz strips away our forged innocence, shocks us into new awarenesses, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers—settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing—to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence. Best of all, she points a way beyond amnesia, paralyzing guilt, or helplessness toward discovering our deepest humanity in a project of truth-telling and repair. AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES will forever change the way we read history and understand our own responsibility to it.

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To see the mind of a billionaire pondering free speech as a problem to monetize, the last sentence of this article is priceless!!!

‘Civility’ a divisive issue in U. of I. faculty decisions
By Jodi S. Cohen, ChicagoTribune reporter

AUGUST 29, 2014, 7:52 PM

In defending its decision to rescind a job offer to Steven Salaita, a professor who posted controversial tweets about Israel, University of Illinois trustees said they would not tolerate demeaning speech.

The university’s position — particularly its use of the word “civility” — mirrors language used by U. of I. Board Chairman Christopher Kennedy when the board denied emeritus status in 2010 to retired faculty member Bill Ayers, the controversial University of Illinois at Chicago professor and Vietnam War-era radical.

The most recent incident has led to a rocky start to the school year at the Urbana-Champaign campus, with student protests and faculty unrest in the wake of Salaita’s job offer being rescinded weeks before school started. The university’s decision has raised questions about the board’s role in faculty decisions, how social media communications can factor into employment matters, and the legality and appropriateness of judging one’s “civility” — especially on a college campus.

Critics have said the Salaita decision is an affront to free speech and the academic freedom that protects faculty who speak out about controversial issues. On Friday, the national American Association of University Professors, in a letter to campus Chancellor Phyllis Wise, said it was “deeply concerned” and urged that the university pay Salaita his $85,000 annual salary until the matter is resolved.

In an interview with the Tribune on Friday, Kennedy discussed the administration’s use of “civility” in recent high-profile faculty decisions. The university rescinded Salaita’s job offer in early August after he posted numerous tweets over several months criticizing Israel in its ongoing conflict with Hamas, including some that contained vulgar and inflammatory language. Salaita had accepted the job offer in October 2013 and had resigned his position at Virginia Tech earlier this year.

“We create an environment appropriate for students to learn in,” Kennedy said. “In the few instances where the board has been brought into decisions regarding faculty, our position has been really consistent in terms of creating an environment that produces great citizens.
“We need to learn how to live with each other, to argue, to discuss, to arrive at truths and to move on — and that requires a lot more effort than having a shouting match or name calling,” Kennedy said, pointing to Salaita’s “manner in which he expresses himself, not the expression itself.”

“We have to be sensitive to the community that we were founded to serve. … At the University of Illinois, we take enormous tax subsidies from people in our state. We can’t be so cavalier to think that any behavior is acceptable.”

The decision, however, has created an uproar among faculty members at the U. of I. and throughout the country. Among those who have come to Salaita’s defense is Ayers, bringing together two professors who have put the university in an unwelcome spotlight in recent years.

In a blog post last week, Ayers wrote that he was “in full solidarity” with Salaita and what he called the U. of I.’s “pattern of disregard for free speech and academic freedom,” pointing out the similarities with his own run-in with the administration.

In the Ayers decision in 2010, Kennedy said he could not support someone whose dedication page in a 1974 book included Sirhan Sirhan, the man who had assassinated his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The rest of the board voted unanimously to deny Ayers the emeritus status, a mostly honorific title given to retired faculty.

To compare, here are the university’s positions in the two cases.

About Salaita: “We must constantly reinforce our expectation of a university community that values civility as much as scholarship.”

About Ayers, Kennedy said: “A university should be not only a place of sharp discourse but also, ultimately, a place of civility.”

Ayers, who taught at UIC for more than two decades and had been one of the university system’s most controversial faculty members, offered support to Salaita in an interview with the Tribune.

Ayers and others have seized upon the university’s use of the word “civility,” saying it is a dangerous slippery slope, especially at universities where debate is to be nurtured.
“The board (of trustees’) job is to keep an eye on the budget and hire and fire leadership, without undermining the whole purpose of the university,” he said.

“The whole work of academics is to challenge ideas and orthodoxy. …The idea that we should just be nourishing each other, to just be civil, is just ridiculous,” Ayers said. “Should they check everyone’s Twitter accounts and make sure they are civil? And what does that mean? ‘Civil’ is a perfect word to use if you want to vaguely defend your censorship.”

The controversy primarily has rankled faculty in the humanities departments. The American Indian studies program, where Salaita was to have worked, voted no confidence in Chancellor Wise. On Thursday, the university’s department of philosophy said it lacked confidence in the university’s chancellor, president and trustees, saying the decision showed a “culpable disregard” for academic freedom and free speech.

Nearly 17,000people have signed a petition asking that Salaita get his job back, and faculty members at other institutions have canceled scheduled campus appearances or said they would not attend events at the university’s campuses at Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield.
Salaita could not be reached for comment. He had been hired for a tenured position in the university’s American Indian studies program.

Kirk Sanders, chair of the Urbana-Champaign philosophy department, said the university’s remarks about civility were a factor in the no-confidence vote. “Setting aside the question of what it might mean to demean or abuse a viewpoint, such a broad and unqualified ‘civility standard’ … seems clearly at odds with both the academic freedom in particular and freedom of speech more generally,” he wrote in an email.

John Wilson, a member of the Illinois AAUP chapter’s committee on academic freedom, said the U. of I. has had “some serious problems” with faculty decisions, citing the board actions with Salaita, Ayers and Louis Wozniak, whose tenure was revoked earlier this year after a history of clashes with the administration.

“What is really dangerous about civility as a criteria is that it is so ambiguous,” said Wilson, who co-edits the Illinois Academe blog. “One person’s incivility is another person’s passion, and it becomes dangerous when you have professors judged not on their scholarship or their teaching ability, but on their politeness and particularly their politeness when they are off the job.
“People act very differently in their personal lives, and certainly Salaita is very different in the classroom than he is in how he tweets.”

In June and July, Salaita posted prolifically about the situation in Gaza, particularly about the children killed in the conflict.

On June 20, soon after three Israelis were kidnapped and killed, he wrote: “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the (expletive) West Bank settlers would go missing.” In another post, he wrote: “At this point, if (Israel President Benjamin) Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?”
In a statement about Salaita, the U. of I. trustees, president and other top officials wrote that academic freedom and free speech should be “tempered in respect for human rights.” In a separate statement, Chancellor Wise said the university values and encourages “differing perspectives” and “robust — even intense and provocative — debate and disagreement” but would not tolerate “personal and disrespectful words or actions.”

Kennedy said Friday that university officials are open to working out a financial agreement with Salaita, but that there has been a “communications gap” as Salaita has changed attorneys.

“Our intention isn’t to hurt him financially,” Kennedy said. “We don’t like to see that. We are not trying to hurt the guy. We just don’t want him at the university.”

Shortly after the legendary rebel singer Pete Seeger passed from this world, a friend passed on to me We Will Reign from The Last Internationale—and life came back into balance. Sad to say so long to Pete who’d provided so many sweet harmonies for many, many righteous campaigns gone by, but ecstatic to meet the newest phoenix rising from the old and laying down a powerful soundtrack for what lies ahead. Delila’s strikingly lucid voice, Edgey’s driving chords, Brad’s perfect beats mixed with a vision that synchronizes: it’s all such a stunning symmetry.
The Last Internationale picks up the torch carried in various places and at different times by Bob Marley and the Wailers, Nina Simone, Public Enemy, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Rage Against the Machine, and hundreds more. That torch is deployed here to illuminate the dark spaces of injustice as well as to light up a path toward freedom. The Last Internationale speaks with passion and intimacy to anarchists and guerrillas, to comrades-in-arms, to friends and strangers alike, tripping and running, busting out of jail—breaking all the entanglements that ensnare us, all the cotton wool that smothers us—searching out the rhythms of resistance, and deploying every one of the weapons within reach: truth-telling and courage, beauty and form, abiding patience and infinite perseverance, indignation, urgency, incitement, and mostly love. These power-house rebel-rockers hold the torch with renewed confidence and a sparkling fresh spirit.
We Will Reign overflows with emotional richness and humanity, challenges us to throw off the lifeless, unpleasant, and unerotic in our lives, and announces a profound truth: any revolution worth having will be powered by a deep desire for joy as well as justice. We can feel the thud of the police stick and the searing pain of the interrogation cell, but also the exhilaration of choosing to lead a moral life in a world gone mad, and the power of pursuing a politics based on freedom dreams beyond dogma and opportunism. The music hums with the universal hope for a world in balance and at peace, and it’s punctuated with the most basic human cry: I shall create! I found myself provoked and agitated, gasping for air, talking to myself and hollering back, laughing through tears while screaming above the ecstasy. WWR does what good art demands: I was in orbit.
We Will Reign—part joyous awakening, part indictment of unnecessary suffering, part astonishing love-letter, and part full-throated invitation to a revolution—is not so much a map as a beckoning, not a completed script, but fragments of an unfinished improvisation. They have a story to tell, a thousand stories really, echo after echo from long ago and from just a minute past, reverberations booming toward an uncertain future and ricocheting back at us, refrains from the rough but lovely localities of the wretched of the earth to the hard boundaries of lost and disappearing things. Every line calls us together and invites us to create, each gestures toward a world that could be but is not yet; every note offers another door you might squeeze through in search of the rest of your life. Turn the knob, slip the lip, dive headfirst into the wreckage—now there you are.
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