Libya's Next Challenge (America's Next Step)

This is not good. I'm officially what President Barack Obama would call a "cynic." I discovered this yesterday as my twitter feed and news alerts started going off about how Libyan rebels had taken Tripoli and the rule of Qaddafi had effectively ended. The news started coming in and I just kept waiting for two things to happen.

First, when will it be that the major news networks start playing up the possibility that Libya becomes a "terrorist safe haven" and an "Islamic state." We all know this is inevitable, and that any support given now for Libya's overthrow of Qaddafi will soon be replaced with the jingoist paradigm that has so defined the last two decades. What is happening now is the typical jubilation that goes with any instance in which Western involvement is seen as having a positive, democratizing effect somewhere else in the world. What will happen soon is the typical "they don't know how to really have democracy" trope as fear begins to creep into the discussion surrounding Libya.

Second, I'm waiting for the United States to engage in usual, interest protecting, covert operations. These are not new, and they have defined the behavior of the executive branch since the 1950's, at the very least. How long will it be before CIA operations focus on forming a stabilized government friendly to American interests. This is not some outlandish, conspiratorial thought process; its a logical extension of American history in foreign intervention.

Of course, I hope that this time will be different. The idealist in me really wants the new Libya to be treated with mutual respect and welcomed into the international community on fair and open terms. But it's incredibly difficult for me to entertain these hopes seriously. Such was not the case with Afghanistan or Iraq, nor has the Egyptian government in the post Mubarak era been treated as a nation in charge of its own destiny. Egypt is perhaps the best example of how things can go so wrong because American media sources have continued to play up the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of an Islamic state. These speculative news stories play directly into the xenophobic fears of many people who watch these cable news networks and they thus raise support for international intervention. Or, at least, it creates a de facto justification for when the intervention comes to light.

I'm not trying to take this into Manufacturing Consent territory, I'm just trying to express how my cynicism tempers my hope for the future of international events. The United States has a long rap sheet of foreign intervention and a bad history with countries in the Magreb and throughout the Middle East. So when I hear that Tripoli has been freed from Qaddafi's rule, I cannot help but hold my breath for the other shoe to drop. The loud, cable TV shoe.

As events unfold in Libya, I also wait to see events unfold within the American discourse around Libya. It will tell us a great deal about the future of American relations with the Middle East beyond simply what policies the current administration chooses to pursue. It will also be important to pay attention to exactly what kind of rhetoric the new Libyan government takes up in lieu of NATO involvement in the struggle against Libya's dictator. Those developments will be instructive of how deep the scars are from the post-colonial era.

The Art of Being Preachy

It has not escaped me that this blog has become very preachy as of late. I've been venting about political events and the climate of discourse with no real coherence to speak of. And as I speed every fast towards my fate as a graduate student in anthropology (assuming I take care of the red tape matters at hand) I wonder about what kind of anthropologist I'm going to be. Maybe as importantly, I wonder what kind of person I am going to be.

The question of what kind of person I am is not as easy to answer as I thought. After all, I am very aware of who I am trying to be- what ethical questions I have to answer on a day by day basis are shaped by who I imagine myself as- but I don't have a great idea of who I am right now. Its entirely possible that its an impossible question to answer because we may all be highly dynamic to the point that asking questions about ourselves in stasis is moot. Or maybe I'm just very, very bad at being truly self-reflexive.

Except when it comes to being self-conscious about what I write on this blog. Whenever I finish talking about some political event or climate I have to step back and say "how would an anthropologist talk about this?" or more often "would an anthropologist talk about this at all?" These are really inane questions- of course- because it always comes across as contrived and boring when someone tries to pigeonhole their entire life based on what they do for a living. But still, the question extends to my thoughts about my career as I move forward.

For four years I got very good at talking about politics (contrary to what this blog may indicate). I don't mean political forecasting or superficial analysis, rather discussions of philosophical genealogies of contemporary political events and questions of identity in international politics. But at the same time I really got frustrated with the fields of International Relations and Political Science. The kinds of questions, and the way I can answer the questions. Anthropology allowed my line of questioning and curiosity to really have room to breathe, and the more I learned about the field the more I really came to love it. But I'm still very new at this, and maybe I need more practice at talking about anthropology.

Yet, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the things I write about here don't matter. They matter to me a great deal. I think they are important discussions to have with serious implications for the world I am coming up into. What I wonder is what my perspective is. I fall into the trap, far too often, that ones perspective is singular and tied to what they do principally. If all I did was write entries in the voice of an anthropologist, whatever that would be, I would be very bored with what I am doing.

When I write here, I am mostly venting. I am sometimes asking people who are reading to think about things from a new angle. When I talk about the debt ceiling, I often want to think about how our discursive climate has affected things, not what the politicians are doing. So, when it comes to it, this blog is not me trying to be something, but just being what I am. That doesn't mean I know what that is, simply that I am acting that out. And the perspective that I bring cannot be forced.

Perspectives are not limited by who we want to be, but who we were and are as well. The most valuable things I have to offer are not to be sectioned off and defined as being "anthropological" but are those things which are collectively influenced by my experience.

So the moral of the story- don't ever expect me to write like I would in an academic setting. And I'm sorry I'm so preachy. Kind of.

The Right to Remain Anonymous?

Internet stalking seems to be really fashionable, and it is no secret that I indulge in various social networking websites on a pretty constant basis. And, quite honestly, I don't believe that its up for debate that these websites and services are having a pretty direct and meaningful impact on the societies it has become a part of (and those which they may be creating). But with these websites comes a pervasive question of privacy and what kinds of privacy people are entitled to when they use these websites.

This morning I was reading this article on a Google+ Insider. As Google attempts to push its way into the social networking website, there are bond to be ever more contests between the Google Team and Facebook- and this particular one happens to revolve around the ways in which applications on the social networking websites may collect and utilize your personal information. I wont bother with a synopsis of the terms of use regarding privacy- you can easily go and find that yourself. However, I am left asking "what exactly constitutes personal information?"

After all, when I created my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts (not to mention old sites I don't use anymore, such as Myspace, Livejournal, or Xanga) did I not sign up to have my information posted online? See, this may be one of the biggest problems with assuming that consumers can have a regulatory affect on markets- consumers are not always rational actors with perfect knowledge. I'll admit it right now, I didn't sit down and read the terms of use when I created my accounts. And I haven't checked them each time they have come up with new versions. So am I not to blame if my information is being "leaked" or otherwise distributed?

Of course, there have been cases where companies have distributed information and disclosed such actions to no one, leaving for some legal gray areas to be worked out. And the information I posted is not necessarily "private" information. I want this information to be shared- of course just not to everyone. So there are obviously places where disclosure is absolutely necessary, but to claim that the information is personal is just a little bit disingenuous. These aren't tidbits of secret information, or at least they shouldn't be.

The whole iPhones tracking your location scandal doesn't sit well with me, and seeing the same ability being applied to Google+ and Facebook does, however, make me a little wary. And while I have disabled these features, there is a pretty stark contrast in abilities between me, the user, and the providers of any service I sign up for. As technologies move forward, it is not really practical for me to be able to keep track of everything the provider suddenly becomes able to do. How will I know when they suddenly can know when I'm using a public restroom off of highway 55?

In my third year of college I did a research project on cyberbullying which explored the ways in which we, as an individual oriented society, have been unable or unwilling to think about personal interactions online in a more critical fashion and have often dismissed the Internet as "not being real life." I have heard many people talk about how the teenagers who suffer from cyberbullying are unstable people anyway, and it didn't matter how they got bullied. What is ignored in such an argument, however, is that Internet technologies, including social networking, have actually broken apart the private/public divide that we thought existed. It is possible to be chased home by your problems outside. The Internet, while being accessed in a "private" setting is not really a private domain. And this is the heart of the issue, I believe. There's a tendency to link the Internet with the privacy of the home without realizing that the very existence of the Internet is predicated upon "public" or shared movement of information.

I don't actually know how to feel about these issues in any meaningful sense. I'm reluctant to give Internet providers or other service providers a free pass to disguise what they do from users. The Internet is largely produced by public use and exchange. At the same time, I think it may be foolish to believe that the Internet is capable of being a private space. What is Internet privacy, and what would it really look like?

Political Bias in Universities

I have often heard that Universities are insidious places where liberal professors brainwash students into believing only in the liberal perspective. The theory goes that professors are usually hired only because they are liberal, and that these professors go one to subvert the minds of you students and bend them away from the "conservative" perspective. Of course, this would have to mean that the students are not only brainwashed when it comes to social issues, but also economic issues. On August 5th, Inside Higher Ed attempted to get at this issue of political bias in an article linked here. However, Higher Ed moved to discuss how the academy is usually inept or unwilling to examine its own climate while it turns its attention to institutions outside of itself. I don't take issue with that point, but I am instead disappointed that we did not see a much more in depth perspective on politics inside undergraduate institutions.

Professors, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff all have political views formed when they arrive to any university. This is the inescapable result of the maxim "opinions are like belly buttons; everyone has one." But the question is, do these university members actively brainwash students towards a liberal position? Having gone to college, I have a hard time seeing how. No professor ever mocked a student's political position in front of me- even when they were horribly unsubstantiated by evidence. Even in working with professors in the political science department, no political platform was ever formed and espoused by the professor. Robert A. Pape, for example, talked at length about the theoretical issues and hypothesis behind suicide terrorism, but he never repeated any political stance held by either major U.S. party. He did not take a stand on what the military's budget should be, how it should be raised, or any such talking point. To this day, I don't know if Pape is a democrat, republican, independent, or apolitical spectre haunting the University of Chicago.

I bring this up to illustrate that political views are not always widely broadcasted by professors. I'm certain a counter anecdote can certainly be brought up to nullify my statement above, but I would argue that a professor who exposes their political views before a class of undergraduates risks losing credibility with his or her students. If a professor exposes something along the lines of "republicans are all idiots, under-educated and woefully inept on issues facing this country" he or she can turn off students who come from conservative backgrounds and thus failing at his or her job. This is not to say that some professors harbor no such feelings, I'm certain some do, but that such positions are highly risky in a classroom setting.

At the same time, I have had great difficulty arriving at a conclusion about what professors of any discipline should have to say about politics. This question is perhaps more relevant to members of the social sciences than it is to the hard sciences in some respects. Professors are expected to be experts in their fields, and could potentially inform policy makers and publics alike on issues pertinent to the political discourse of the day. But should academics choose to come down on a side during any debate, do they not immediately fall subject to the rhetoric of the opposing side? This is a question of courage for the academic who chooses to speak up. He or she will have to face the inevitable onslaught of vitriolic rhetoric that is so common today.

It should also be mentioned that the notion of the academy being nothing but liberals is difficult for me to wrap my head around. My alma mater, for example, is home to the Chicago School of Economics- one of the juggernauts of fiscal conservatism of the twentieth century. The modern father of free-market economics, Milton Freedman, called Chicago home during his formative years. And many professors I have met have not fallen in line with what most people would call "liberal." Perhaps this is what is at issue. Being liberal when it comes to social issues is certainly pervasive at universities- but I believe that comes with a function of being educated to think critically and broadly. As soon as this occurs, there is a tendency to categorize someone as being a "liberal." But there are so many other factors that make up someone's political views. Members of philosophy departments are certainly not going to have the exact same political philosophies. They may all be seen as being 'liberal' but may have some views that don't fall into line with that political label.

Politics during my undergraduate education were at once ubiquitous and obscured. I can't say I was brainwashed (how would I know?) but I can also say that I never really had a political discussion with any of my professors. I'm sure there will be the argument that such brainwashing occurs under the radar, in a highly esoteric fashion. But this is such a sign of disrespect to the students who are attaining a college education. To believe they can be so easily persuaded with some sort of jedi-mind trick is insulting to the students themselves. I know that these views are commonly held in tandem with anti-intellectualism, but at the core is a serious misunderstanding of how politics in university settings (at least with undergraduates) works.

If I ever hope to teach, this is certainly something I will have to come to terms with. There are injustices that I don't think anyone should be silent about, but sometimes these injustices are perceived only through particular lenses. At the same time, the goal of educating undergraduates should be, I believe, to influence students to think laterally irrespective of whatever they hope to do after graduation. It is not to transmit a particular set of doctrine, but to instill critical thinking. Of course, no matter what I do I'll still be the liberal academic hippy in the ivory tower who is so removed from reality its not even funny.

Of Course! He's LYING

Every morning, I make my rounds through several news websites to check on some of the big stories as well as some of the smaller ones. Today, I had a convergence of two of these websites, NPR and The New York Times. NPR featured a small article on Warren Buffett's Op-Ed to the New York Times about how he feels that the "super-wealthy" really should be taxed at much higher rates. He also counters the much touted argument that taxes kill jobs when he states

People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

This isn't a revolutionary argument- people on twitter have said the same thing in about 140 characters since this whole debate started. But when Warren Buffett says it, people have a very different reaction. Rather than rebutting the point with "you don't know anything about economics" we have the following gems from the comment section of NPR

Yet... somehow Mr. Buffett sounds so magnanimous. It's all talk. He SAYS he want's to pay more... there's nothing STOPPING him from paying more. Put your $ where your mouth is! Write the check!

There's clearly a missing step in this person's reading of Mr. Buffett's original editorial, assuming he or she even bothered to go and read the original editorial at all. Mr. Buffett is not concerned with his taxes alone, but is after the more systemic problem in the American tax code. Of course, a wealthy man saying that taxes on the rich should be raised has to a) have an ulterior motive and b) is wrong that he doesn't pay enough. If Buffett had come out and said that he pays enough (or too much) we can be certain that people on the right would be touting his words as proof positive of their views being correct. But because he came out in the exact opposite, his credibility must be utterly undermined and you get comments like:

Fair Tax: EVERYBODY including John the tax cheat Kerry, pays 20% Consumption and everything. It makes too much sense for manipulative-minded liberals who have a socialist agenda for America.

What's of further interest is that, of course, no one on the comment section actually came out with figures and arguments to the contrary of what Mr. Buffett has argued for. Instead we have wonderful diatribes and efforts to simply wrest any degree of authority from Buffett (including some really well placed red herrings). Now, I'm not trying to really come down on the issue at hand so much as I am trying to point out how hopelessly disappointing the comments of the readers are. I think Buffett makes a great argument and I am entitled to agree or disagree with him on whatever basis I see fit so long as it is on topic and critically thought out. Not so with our fine Internet denizens. Instead, soundbites and personal attacks govern the land.

Mr. Buffett's argument is not outlandish, and it underscores some the largest issues we have in the relationship between government and citizens. For some reason, there's a knee jerk reaction to protect the super wealthy from taxes because, and I have heard this many times, taxes lead to a removal of our freedoms. This is F.A. Hayek's argument stripped of what little support it had to begin with. And the end result is a group of posters who throw themselves full screed ahead.

I can't generalize as to why this is the case. I just don't know who these people are or what they have done to put themselves into such a horrible position when it comes to the formation of arguments and opinions. What I do know is that anytime I see these comments posted, I lose a little faith. I have to get in the habit of staying away from the comment sections of most websites. It's not that people are inherently stupid- its just that some of the stupidest ones are the loudest.

There are.... TERRORISTS IN YOUR COMPUTER!

The hacker groups Anonymous and Lulzsec have been getting a lot of attention lately, despite the fact that all they have really done is create minor disruptions. Nonetheless, I have been hearing an ever increasing amount of talk about the need for better internet security. And no doubt, there have been even more worrying signs that cyberspace may be the next front line in international antagonisms. The future of "cyber warfare" is a topic I'd much rather leave to experts in the field. I have a hard enough of a time trying to get my computer to wake up from sleep mode.

The other day, however, I heard a segment on the radio talking about the possibility that these hacker groups, notably Anonymous and Lulzsec, could be infiltrated by terrorists. This claim, of course, presumes that these hackers are not terrorists by virtue of their action and that only jihadists classify as terrorists. The entire segment was about how international terrorists could infiltrate the groups and turn them against the Western regimes. Ladies and gentlemen, there are terrorists in your computer.

Again, the underlying assumption here is that only jihadists or islamic fundamentalists can be terrorists, and that cyber attacks may be the next place they chose to go after American interests. This simply highlights the cumbersome nature of the words we choose to use. Anonymous isn't a terrorist organization, or at least I don't think it is, unless they are infiltrated by groups like al Qaeda. I can't help but feel as though a certain degree of islamaphobia underscores the very segment I heard on air.

If McCarthy had internet connection, no doubt he'd have suggested the very same thing. I know this is a cliché parallel to draw, but its fairly apt. Since 9/11 our phantoms have been terrorists out to destroy us by whatever nefarious methods they may have. And now, there is a small group who genuinely fear that terrorists will wage war against the US via cyberspace. Now, there's already evidence that state actors have already begun attacking one another (linked above) but this is not enough for people. We need the boogeymen to be everywhere. Oh, and the boogeymen are all only muslims.

What bothers me is that the threats of cyber attacks have to be instantly coupled with terrorism, and that our definition of terrorism has to be so narrowly defines (though the use of the word "terrorism" itself is problematic already). There are, of course problems with the notion that terrorist organizations have a vetted interest in using cyber attacks. Such attacks expose attackers to being located and are limited in the scope of their possible damage. But beyond that, there's still the question of why we feel the need to associate terrorism with the threat of cyber attacks.

Let's also forget the notion that the hackers who comprise Anonymous and Lulzsec are not automatically manipulatable. Just because a "terrorist" infiltrates an organization does not mean that the organization will then go along with whatever this individual suggests. But these problems don't phase these commentators at all- terrorists are everywhere!

I'm not going to say that this is impossible, I just don't have that kind of information. Still, the leaping to that conclusion is troubling. At best, its just a way to sell the product of news commentary- terrorism sells. At worst, its islamaphobic paranoia that's divorcing itself from careful analysis of the situation at hand. In any event, even if Anonymous takes down facebook like they said they would, they better leave Penny Arcade alone.

Trading in Our Futures

When I was a kid, it was impossible for me to really imagine myself beyond a small window of time. Perhaps 3 or 4 months down the road. This, of course, did not stop me from playing imagination with the future. Entering middle school was exciting because the way we changed classes every 45 minutes, to me, fulfilled the ability to pretend I was more grown up than I was. I would pretend to be older, but only by a little bit, and I contented myself with this. Similarly, I was uncertain that the future would really exist. I remember, in the 5^th grade, being genuinely afraid that the world would end with the start of Y2K and that I'd never be a “grown-up.” I could only look a little bit down the road and, at the same time, I was always convinced that the end of the road was only slightly beyond that. Fatalism strikes the young mind in very terrifying ways, but it does far more damage to the mind that is declared to be matured.

The future is part and parcel of the way we conceive of our lives now in every respect. I cannot be certain that this was any different in times gone by, but the future does seem to have a remarkable place in the way we conceive of ourselves and our livelihoods. The obvious example is the forecasting that takes place in our stock markets. We trade on futures, anticipations of what things will look like- what people will want. The present is not really the main concern unless it directly reveals a potential glimpse into what things will look like down the road. Perhaps another way the future has become our time period of operation is in the way the past is obscured. The past is often employed to predict the future, as many use the discipline of history as a predictive tool, forgetting that we often interpret the past only in terms of a provincial present.

And fear is always cloaked about the future. We anxiously await the time China is predicted to finally overtake the US as the world's largest economy assuming that, with that moment, something fundamentally American will vanish. If being the largest economy is so integral to being American, then yes, our identities as Americans shall be washed away and rightfully so. Nothing so shallow should be so vital to our collective identities (whatever they may be). The future is what we look to for our guidance and it holds all of our deepest fears. Some of these fears are certainly warranted- we carry on demanding sight of the future without taking notice of all the dangers that we have engendered ourselves. And now, we look at the future and cannot escape from a certain amount of dread. We have been undone and the decline now begins.

I don't see escape from this mentality being simple in any respect. Thinking of the possibilities that come with crisis is not so hard when we are so convinced that we are about to lose everything that makes us, well, us. Perhaps we have failed to look at the present with any degree of care to the point that we no longer recognize ourselves as people living in the moment. We only see decay around the corner with no notion of what will persist beyond that point.

All of this presumes that we are in fact on a path of impending decline- its fatalistic. There are many, many voices- rational or otherwise- that have always insisted that this is the place we would end up going. Even I, in high school, thought in terms of this fatalism about the United States. I avidly read things by Noam Chomsky, for example, with this absolute certainty that everything he said was fundamentally correct. I spent my senior year writing a 38 page paper on the parallels between ancient empires and the United States (which, today, looks like nothing more than a trite exercise) that concluded with the declaration that all empires fall. And they do. But I really don't think that back then I was ever really convinced that I would see this decline in my lifetime.

Maybe I'm not convinced of it now. In any event, I think people do really hope that what we are experiencing now is just a natural cycle in the way our economy works and that prosperity and progress, as we defined it before, shall return to us. Yet there are others who predict and utterly grim and total collapse of the world as we know it, replaced by something else. We look to the future and assume it is directing this present we now exist in. The future is at once uncertain and determining with our present selves prostrate before it. This is part of why we feel such anxiety about our material life and why we cannot constructively imagine ourselves beyond the next six months.

I have written this post completely laced with a kind of fatalism. I think, like many people, I want to be able to have a confidence that everything is going to be alright. But what I would define as “alright” is not entirely clear. Perhaps comfort materially and mentally is all I require to feel as though things are “alright.” Maybe we need to jettison our dependence on the future in favor of understanding the present. Rather than building ourselves towards some expected future we must become more reactionary to the events of the present. We're going to give ourselves Paris Syndrome when it comes to the future, and that would really cripple our collective confidence.

Things may get much, much worse in the near future. I, and everyone else, have no choice but to live with that prospect. Things may get much better in the near future, as well. We cannot passively await that possibility. The more I think about it, the more I think we have handed our agency on to something that may or may not exist in the form we imagine it.

Nothing here is serious scholarship or spoken with any degree of confidence in the complexities behind what we are experiencing now. Its spoken through the mind of someone who still wrestles with the uncertainty and fatalism of a kid who just worried about to much as well as the mind of someone who truly believes things must change because the way people behave and think today has become very unsettling. 

Being Afraid

I feel like my blog has betrayed some of my obsession with politics in recent posts. I don't know, just a nagging suspicion.

Watching as the S&P has downgraded the United States Credit Rating has been interesting. Part of it is because I am only vaguely aware of the complexities involved in international finance. But a much bigger part of it is because of the questions and reactions I have already begun to take notice of. Underpinning all of the observations and comments made about the last month has been a prevailing sense of anxiety and uncertainty.

The person with whom I am staying with in Denver asked me what I thought about the whole situation. After briefly talking about the childishness of the Congressional leaders who helped bring about this scenario, we also acknowledged how the material mentality of many people had likewise contributed to the serious problems of the economy. We touched on some fairly common themes; people bought houses they couldn't afford because the house is a symbol of success, credit has become the medium of purchase over the previous four decades, and the surplus of the Clinton era promoted an environment of reckless borrowing. Testing these assumptions empirically is not really my concern because it is the relative truth of these statements that is so interesting to me. My host was looking back on the last two decades and identifying a pattern of material and financial life that she had lived through. We concluded our discussion with her saying, point blank, "its all really scary."

I think, at the heart of all this anxiety, may be the fact that the uninterrupted "progress" experienced by the US has really hit a serious road bump. The progress I refer to is material consumption. An unyielding march towards more consumption and more purchasing with no hint of retreating. We have, in the United States, become accustomed to such a powerful array of purchasing opportunity and material diversity that it seems unimaginable that such prosperity could be eroded. I think people genuinely worry that their way of life will be reversed or perhaps lead to a steady decline in American material prosperity.

And news agencies demonstrate a concept that dovetails into this fear over material declination. NPR's headline as of today is "American Pride takes hit with S&P's Downgrade" The article quotes a professor of economics as saying "[the downgrade] is a way of saying that our government isn't working right now." I think this is certainly true. As James Loewen noted, there is a precedent in American education in history to believe that our government always does the right thing (see Lies My Teacher Told me Chapter 11). But the government did not do the right thing, and everyone can see it plainly. Already, government officials have retuned to political blame games and there is little hope, in my view, that these things will change any time soon. But when NPR refers to "American Pride" what exactly is the source of that pride? Certainly not a pride in our self-proclaimed values (values which many of us do take seriously but feel are not lived up to).

This pride is one of having great wealth and being a country of uninterrupted progress that is measurable by what is in stores and what is in our homes. Or that's my first theory. It must be difficult for people to imagine that things are going to get worse, not better. I know that its a difficult prospect for me as I head out on my own. What the next week will bring is a difficult enough question that looking 6 months into the future seems impossible. And this really adds to the sense of anxiety that is creeping into the minds of many people I talk to every day. Day by day people look to the stock markets as barometers of their own futures and they await whatever reactions come from the brokers and traders.

What a downer of a blog post. And this really doesn't contribute anything of merit. But sometimes I just like to hink out loud.

Books from the Past -or- Not out of the Woods Yet

My descent from Rocky Mountain National Park is coupled with news that the stock markets have taken a serious nose dive and people in Breckenridge are snobs. But I'm on the last stretch of my "unplugged period" (which is what this will be called in my memoirs) and as such I can now finally bother all of you with my thoughts.

During this break in the park I have read Erik Larson's new book In the Garden of the Beasts which proved to be a very easy and interesting read. I have also picked up a book that people have talked about for years and years but that I only just now had any interest in reading. James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me strikes me as both thought provoking and utterly banal at the same time. Maybe that's because any teach who had an impact on me in High School actually took Loewen's work to heart and applied it in earnest. In any event, while I have learned some really great little American History factoids, two things really stuck out to me in reading this book.

First, Loewen's book really dovetails into calls for the improvement of the American education system. Politicians and community members have been fixated on the really dismal performance of our public education system and have demanded that our students begin to perform better on standardized tests and other notable metrics. But what Loewen points to is that our education really is too geared towards the bland, unenjoyable memorization of facts in schooling. Loewen takes a very hard stance against the way American history textbooks have made history mundane, rather than exciting and dynamic. There were moments early in the book when Loewen would mention that blatant lack of discussing cultural syncretism in the expansion of the US or the unwillingness for textbooks to present just how contentious many episodes of American history really are. He even demands that textbooks teach High School students abou the less-than-savory episodes of our government's history. And at first I thought to myself "come on, these high schoolers are just not advanced enough to understand all of this." But I have to stop myself, because here is both my cynicism talking and my inability to recognize that the problem isn't the level of material presented at the High School level, but the fact that our education systems do not prepare students to really learn and think.

Over the spring I spoke with a professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago who spoke about how, in any given classroom only 30% of the students were actually ready for college work and material. The other 70% simply contented themselves with poor grades because they would not ask for help or blamed her for their own misfortunes. See, the issue is that there is a pressure for students to attend college as the logical next step in their development but the schools rarely provide the background it takes to really learn. The reason I, at first, scoffed at Loewen's suggestions is because these were all perspectives I didn't pick up until my senior year of High School and developed in college. But I'm a product of a really terrible public school- I was just lucky enough to have met the right people at the right time.

Lowen's standards seem so impossibly high to me because, from a young age, American students are taught to learn for a test and memorize dead facts- not living and vibrant disciplines. In short, we have done a really terrible job of teaching our students how to learn. Success is a 30 or better on the ACT, not critical thought and engagement with arguments. I have thought a lot about higher education without looking at the fact that the way students in the US learn is not conducive to real scholarship. And all students are not going to be college material of the highest order, but that should not be a measure of success. The measure of success should be equipping students how to engage their world critically. Alas, I dream.

Secondly, if the administration and community members are really interested in competing in terms of innovation, they must change education towards critical thinking, not bland memorization. Innovation is the product of real learning, and learning from contentious fields and arguments. If all we want to do is get students to repeat what already exists then we also resign ourselves to a country of limited innovation. We also hide real history (and by proxy, the other social sciences) when we conceal controversy and failure and glorify success and strip agency from many of the figures of our past and present. There is no innovation without an understanding of failure and an ability to ask and learn.

So when I read Loewen and think he's just a little bit over the top, I also have to note that the problems he's describing go much, much deeper than secondary education textbooks. But I'm not an educator, just a lucky product of public education.

Live from Colorado

The blatant lack of posts this past few days has been a result of me being out camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. It has been really breath taking in the most cliché of ways, and I have smelled about as ripe as a the armpits of the world's fattest man. Its been a great trip, and I have more of it to go.

The last couple of days Kate and I have gone on some hikes up the sides of mountains (much harder than I thought it would be) and the most amazing parts have not been the scenic mountain top views, but instead the moments when a trail runs deep into pine forest. Sound seems to be swallowed up by the trunks and light is slowed to a trickle everywhere. Hiking through these moments of natural quiet, the solitude strikes my deep in the chest and has an incredible knack for stopping my train of thought dead cold.

One of the biggest adjustments to all of this has been the infrequency of internet connectivity. I am so use to having a world of instant feedback at my finger tips where I can put a little bit of myself out there and have it acted on, reacted to, or simply left to drift in the static. My twitter feed (something that is predicated on instant feedback), Facebook, and Google+ all remain silent to me. Yes, even this blog, where I escape to write about nothing in the most indirect way possible is something that is delayed constantly. Up the mountain, swallowed up by the trees I am unconnected and, strangely, it feels ok.

I have gotten very use to killing time in such an efficient manner online, as most people have. I can jump between news websites and YouTube videos for hours, producing nothing and consuming nothing of substance. Sometimes I wonder, if I were convert all the hours I have spent idly online, what kinds of things I could have accomplished? But when these thoughts do come, I get cold inside and run for Penny Arcade to cheer my wasted soul.

You have to imagine a mind use to being over stimulated by heaps of nothing suddenly coming face to face with a wall of trees. A single track path cutting the way through is dwarfed by the enormity of the forest all around it, and instead of nervous mental energy seeking a stead hit of the internet, it is stopped dead. The world is somehow tactile again instead of digitized. My news fix is achieved through a $15 dollar radio with a signal interrupted every time a moose sneezes. And believe me, its been strange observing the stories I have been most invested in not at a constant stream, but in bursts at the beginning and the end of each day,

Maybe there's some moral I should extrapolate from all of this. Something about how I should learn to cut back at my digital life and embrace this corporeal existence in all its ephemeral glory. Maybe. But what I take away from all of this is really that I saw a moose when I woke up this morning. It was a big ass moose.