Senator Flake and His “Complicit”

In all of the thoughtful words that Senator Jeff Flake articulated in his assessment of statesmanship and leadership, and the lack thereof in Donald Trump’s presidency, the word that put me on a course of deeper consideration was complicit.  Flake was obviously implying that those among his colleagues in both Houses who have withheld honest assessments of Trump’s behavior, demeanor and dissembling actually form and promulgate the basis for the dysfunction of United States governance and the decline of America’s international reputation.  And apparently his remarks triggered very little refutation among those colleagues…so far.

When one word jumps out from hundreds in a single communication and sticks in my head overnight, I wonder why.  Does the word have special significance?  Is it just a curiosity for me?  And in a larger sense, had Senator Flake chosen it to associate more than his colleagues in his denunciation?  When I suffer these kinds of questions, I resort to an etymology source to try to figure out what’s going on.

My search discovered that the derivations of the word’s construction and the course of its usage have taken significant turns over the centuries.  From the Late Latin and Old  French, the compl- root meant coming or working together, or partnering to achieve a goal.  Similarly, the -plicit part of it has roots in Greek, Russian, Old Norse, High German and Old English—all suggesting or meaning a folding or plaiting together into a single unit. (Online Etymology Dictionary)  All of this raises the question of how this word could come down to twenty-first century American English as a pejorative or negative marker, indicating a kind of shared coming together in order to separate or to disunite, rather than to combine or literally entwine to form a stronger unit.

So contemporary usage implies that Senator Flake’s direct purpose was to scold and/or shame his colleagues.  And, I think, based on their apparently timid responses, he accomplished his purpose.  The proof will be if their inaction turns to action.  But then, I got thinking some more.  Perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, the senator had us in mind.  I could be projecting here, but so much of what he said applies to the current state of our national consciousness or lack thereof, that it unmistakably resonates with the disarray of civic purpose and direction that encumbers our communities large and small.

We don’t seem to know what to do or to care about our 17 year old forever war in Afghanistan.  We don’t seem to know how to stop the cancerous scourge of opioid addiction and death across the land.  We don’t seem to be able to muster the desire to call out the bad and horrific behavior of some men toward women.  And in the midst of all this and more, we seem to be satisfied to burrow our eyes and our minds into the small and large screens we are addicted to because they reinforce our insular and isolated thinking and beliefs.  The so-called social media blinds us and desensitizes us to the others surrounding us, because that media comprises anti-socially ensconced echo chambers.  We prefer navel gazing and sharing to seeing and thinking beyond our cubicled lives.

Yes, Senator Flake must have had all or some of this in mind as he chose his words.  The tone of futility and exasperation boosting those words clearly meant them to reach beyond the halls of Congress and into the minds and souls of his fellow citizens.

Real world, Actual world. Virtual world

“Just wait until you get into the real world.”  “Things aren’t like that in the real world.”

We hear these jeremiads when we are in…what?  The unreal world?  The surreal world?  Mostly we hear it from people who are in the commercial or business world, the world of pirates, con artists, “masters of the universe”, the population of the “competitive” world, which exerts most of its energy and time scheming and scamming ways to avoid direct competition…the kind that happens in the actual world. 

But that’s not my point.  My point is about our blithe acceptance of the word “real” to mean something akin to “substantive.”  Whatever is real is not only what we perceive but also how we perceive it.  All that is in our real world runs through the filter of who we are and what made us who we are.  For example, a person like me, partially color blind, does not see a green traffic light but rather a sort of grey-blue-green (maybe) light.  My wife sees orange lights, not yellow lights.  That person over there is really tall only because the perceiver is really short.  That’s the easy stuff.  There’s harsher stuff.  For example, every Vietnam veteran I talked to told me the experience “over there” was reality; this homeland stuff isn’t reality.

So any “real world” is about the perceiver of his or her outer experience.  The world exists as perceived, not as it is. This used to be called subjective idealism.  I’m certain it has a more obscure label now.  So, is there another world? Yes.  It is the “actual world.” 

The actual world is a stand-alone world.  As I look out the window to my left, I see various tree and bush leaves gently swaying in a shadowed breeze.  Seen from my air-conditioned room, it is a cooling experience.  But the outside temperature is actually nearly 100 degrees with high humidity, not at all cooling.  I know there is a bird feeder on the other side of the house, but I don’t know what its current condition is.  Have the squirrels ravaged it?  Has a new species decided to visit it?  Are the chipmunks having a picnic underneath it?  These things have occurred, and actually might be occurring now.  Before we humans actually landed on the actual moon, the moon held all sorts of visionary realities for humanity. Actuality has a nasty tendency of draining the romance from reality.

And these days, because of the new magic of digital imaging, we have the virtual world.  The virtual world is a created combination of the real and the actual.  Some of each is placed in there, depending on the whimsy and perception of its creator.  In this sense, the virtual and the real worlds share a common progenitor—the mind of the perceiver/creator.  That is, the individual human.

The irony in all this is that most of us prefer the real and the virtual to the actual.  We seem to prefer our perceptions of the actual world to the actual world, in fact.

This, of course, affects what we mean by the “truth.”  The truth is not the same as the fact.  The truth is the meaning we give to the fact.  A fact has no significance to anything but itself, its ontology, its measurable characteristics and its history.  With truth, as with reality, its meaning and significance are determined by perception.

The Mute Anxiety

 For all the words spoken and written about education “reform” and all the bloviating about teacher benchmarks and evaluations, very little is said about what and how teachers feel.  And part of the reason for this is that teachers keep their most important feelings about what they do to themselves.  They will share these feelings sometimes with intimates and occasionally with colleagues…but only sometimes and occasionally.  The crisis for teachers is that they never, ever know their actual effectiveness, never know on a daily basis how what they say and do affects the individual minds in their care.  And this is why they express such outrage at the thought that this phenomenon can be quantified from test results or even professional observations.  This is the mute anxiety that no one without years of classroom experience knows.

I have a souvenir, a T-shirt tacked on the wall above my workspace.  It was a gift from some of the media studies majors in my department, each one signing some good wishes and thanks on my retirement.  Most are pretty much what one would expect, but a particular note haunts me even today as I look up at it.  It haunts me because I can never know what the student meant.  It reawakens in me the very uncertainty I’m trying to explain.  She wrote:

“Roger

Thank you for your wonderful insights and inspiring lessons.  I’ll miss you terribly!”

First, let me explain this student.  She came to media studies, a bachelor-of-arts program, as someone, new to higher education, who was not certain of degree initials.  For her, it was college, and the major seemed like it might be interesting.  In other words, she was not goal/degree focused; she was interested in learning something, preferably something that would engage her interests.  I think what accounts for the enthusiasm of her farewell was that she had never before realized that learning could be engaging, challenging and interesting.  I was initially impressed by her eagerness, then by her diligence and finally by her originality.  She developed from being very vague about what learning meant to a person for whom learning was critical.

Scan that paragraph.  What in it could be quantified?  What could be benchmarked?  What did I say or do that was so “insightful” so “inspiring” for that person?  What about those two words would have meaning inside some education rubric?  I don’t know, nor could any evaluation.  Only one person could know, and if she had not told me, I would never have known.

An unarticulated, seldom acknowledged experience of the person responsible for the learning in a classroom is the sense of guilt that comes from a feeling of inadequacy.  Simply stated it says, “I don’t know what’s wrong.  I’m trying everything I know, but she’s not getting it.  I don’t know what to do.” This is the feeling that comes from classroom teaching over a long period of time.  It expresses the feeling that the person responsible for the learning that’s going on is the person who has been assigned to the learning environment of that classroom.  No matter what other dynamics might be going on among that particular cohort of presumed learners, no matter what the test results show, the person “in charge” feels a sense of inadequacy, because someone in the room “didn’t get it.”  This is the ongoing anxiety of the teacher in the kindergarten classroom through the mentor in the graduate school seminar.  The person massaging the learning, the person who has used every thing learned over long experience doing it, that person knows from the look on one or two or three faces that something has been missed.  And that’s what she takes home with her.

The tragedy of this is that some teachers eventually weary of the anxiety and fall into the abyss of routine, the very routine that the quantifiers are recommending as the salvation of our education “system,” the reform of America’s “failed” education system—whatever that means.  These teachers who release themselves to routine are the wounded in the classroom ranks.  Some of them—too many of them—are shunned, perhaps even mocked by their colleagues, thus emphasizing how ultimately lonely the task is.  And critics and so-called revolutionaries within the reform movement have been doing their best to sustain this feeling of desperate isolation, to enhance the feeling of failure 

So this, then, is what might be called the tragic paradox of the classroom teacher.  She or he knows that only one professional person, the person doing it, can actually experience what is happening in the classroom.  And a certain amount of pride attaches to that.   But coincidentally that pride becomes the source of the anxiety attached to the uncertainty of whether or not each mind in the process has been inspired to learn not only that much but also to learn much more.

Nothing in what I have learned about the pedagogy behind the Common Core Standards or Race To The Top (that winner-take-all wrapped in Social Darwinism phrase) even begins to entertain the notion that this paradox exists.  Moreover, the local puppet masters who manage these programs represent an entirely new managerial class in American education, a class that gears education as a business enterprise, codified in their titles CEO, CFO, etc.   An approach to education as a business enterprise will discourage learning while it creates loyal, uncritical androids.  It assures the common, while it provides no time for and disparages the exceptional.  Just like in a factory.

A prescient article from 2012

When Will Social Media Elect a President?

Twitter and Facebook will change U.S. politics, as new technology always has. Think Nixon or 'Obama Girl.'

By ANDY KESSLER

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 took place over seven venues, with 10,000-20,000 attendees and no microphones. One candidate would speak for an hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal and then a half-hour response from the original speaker (which alternated debate to debate). This description alone is almost 280 characters—clearly we've come a long way from Honest Abe to the Twitter age. But should we believe the hype about social media's impact on the 2012 election?

Pew Research says no. "Cable leads the pack as campaign news source," it concludes in a recently released 35-page report. "Twitter, Facebook play very modest roles."

Too bad that misses the point. New technologies have always altered campaigns and usually in mysterious ways. Party conventions were first televised in 1952 and soon lost their relevance, becoming scripted theater. Richard Nixon lost votes by sweating under harsh lighting during his televised debate with JFK. Bill Clinton bypassed the traditional news media, playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on his sax on Arsenio Hall's late-night show. MoveOn.org used the Internet to accumulate small donations and host a virtual primary won by Howard Dean, who in turn was brought down by a scream, which in turn went viral on the Web. YouTube was soon created and in 2008 hosted "Obama Girl" and other user-generated campaign ads.

In November 2008, Twitter had about four million users, and 100,000 followed candidate Obama. Today, President Obama has more than 12.5 million followers (while Mitt Romney has about 350,000 and Rick Santorum about 150,000). In 2008, Facebook had roughly 50 million users—nowhere near today's 845 million—and Google+ didn't exist.

Facebook and Twitter are already rivers of political banter—from Rick Perry's "oops" video to infographics of Mr. Obama's insider deals at the Department of Energy. Our friends find dirt and post it without thinking twice. So it tends to be partisan, extreme and divisive—more like a cocktail party than the evening news.

But campaigns can't just do "media buys" of $10 million on Facebook and expect anyone to notice. TV ads are effective because they're intrusive, and this year we'll see $3 billion worth of them, up from $2.1 billion in 2008. Social networks are more subtle media.

Jonathan Collegio of the American Crossroads political action committee explains that "you can bang a TV audience over the head with ads, but online content has to be hot to go viral. No one wants to tweet about or post a lame ad on their Facebook page." Corporations already know this. Vitamin Water "crowdsourced" its next drink flavor, allowing Facebook users to debate and choose it. Old Spice let us tweet to the shirtless guy in its commercial and post 180 response videos with six million views on YouTube—doubling sales in the month the campaign ran. Corona Light became the "most liked" beer on Facebook by letting users upload photos to a 40-foot Times Square billboard.

This viral marketing is what corporate and political campaigns increasingly thrive on, and today it's mostly free. By the 2016 election, it'll surely steal some of the $3 billion in TV ad money. It costs money to stock the campaign backrooms—herbal tea-infused, never smoke-filled—in which coders are tasked with finding innovative ways to bring undecided voters into the fold.

Far better to do that online than through, say, direct mail (which was still a $1 billion political industry in 2008, even though in so many homes it increasingly means mail thrown directly into the recycling bin). Online, one's political affiliation—Democrat, Republican or, most important, independent—can be easily ascertained. Campaigns can read your tweets and your Facebook "likes," plus those of your friends. Campaigns build new databases of independents every election because converting them to one side or the other is the name of the game.

The greatest effect of social networks on Election 2012 will take place behind the scenes. Social networks, like real life, are driven by influencers—not necessarily those with the most friends or followers, but those whose thoughts, ideas and opinions have the biggest impact. Mr. Collegio notes that for political action committees "to seed opinion makers, Twitter is the ultimate platform. Ideas grow into stories on blogs and eventually in the mainstream media." Not the other way around.

For years Google has ranked Web pages according to an algorithm called PageRank. Now there's a new field of study around ranking users in social networks—PeopleRank—according to their influence: how many of their tweets are read, re-tweeted, include links that others click on, etc. Corporations trying to sell high-ticket items are all over this, looking for industry experts, analysts and other buyers that people respect. Startups like Quora and Klout have their own algorithms but you can bet that both major parties are investing in this new-age influence peddling (with Democrats way ahead so far).

Those with social-media "influence" are most likely to help campaigns convert interest into votes. Finding them in the haystack of the real world is tedious and expensive. But harnessing fast servers and constantly upgraded algorithms to find them on social networks is already happening—and it'll definitely sway who becomes our next president.

Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author most recently of "Eat People" (Portfolio, 2011).

Playing' The Dozens With America's Children

African-American social customs were developed long before any slaves set foot on the auction blocks in Charleston and Savannah.  In fact many of the customs were finely tuned during the “middle passage” aboard the diseased and penal ravaged slave ships.

The history of these social customs is as much a part of core American culture as any of our cherished documents.  But don’t look for any of these core customs in the Common Core State Standards or in the curriculum of charter schools, because they mostly represent qualitative standards, not quantitative standards.  Most are about surviving as a community, not about races to separate a few winners to the exclusion of all others.

Playin’ the dozens, aka “snaps” and “battles”, evolved from slavery as a way of laughing in the face of danger and death, a way of putting down (humorously disrespecting) those  who, in their actions, disrespect the community, the liars, the phonies, and the cheaters.  It disallows a person to think too highly of himself within his community.  Clear examples have been shown in various forms of popular culture—in films like Barbarshop and 8 Mile, in TV shows like House of Payne, and in thousands of different rap songs.  In each case the snap calls out a person who has disrespected the community.

The phrase derives from a custom enforced by the slave owner and overseers just prior to the auction.  Those slaves who had succumbed to the various diseases and punishments during the passage and were thus a less desirable commodity were grouped typically into bargain-priced blocs, called “the dirty dozen,” and auctioned as a single sale.  Playin’ the dozens singles out the cheats and liars, those slaves currying favor from the masters and overseers, and shows them to be lower than “the dozens,” making them feel as humiliated as those destitute “bargains.”  (For an introduction to this custom see Percelay, Ivey and Dweck, Snaps, foreword by Quincy Jones, 1994.)

Why and how is this relevant to America's children?  The charter school industry is a latter day representative of the slave system, a dominant group’s exploitation of a powerless, passive group.  Many urban municipalities are faux democracies, and, as with the slave system, everyone knows how they actually work, openly sacrificing the many for the benefit of a few.  So far the implementation and increase of charter schools in American cities has relied on the cooperation of a few strategically placed masters and overseers (party bosses, ward healers and administrations) and a highly functioning cabal of African American “religious” leaders and latter day “house slaves."

This kind of structure is almost identical to the slave system: It couldn’t have worked without political corruption and the willing cooperation of acquiescent members of the ruling class and groveling members of the “slave” community.  And in the matter of the charter school industry, the majority of America’s urban children are becoming the cast off “dozens.”

The debilitating statistics of the charter system are self-evident.  The charters evolve according to how they want to be, not according to serving the learning needs of the community.  They assure their cohesion by casting aside huge bundles of children who do not fit their model of the kind of learners who will help the charters prosper, just like the “dozens” were cast aside.  Moreover, and especially, the charters do not concern themselves with the plight of those cast off bundles.  Just as with those “dozens” at the slave auction, they will be tossed somewhere, anywhere, to some out-of-sight, out-of-mind place, to be under-served and over-worked.

If you think this is an exaggeration, ask yourself these questions:  What happens to the children who do not fit the desired group profile allowed to enter the charter school, or are disposed of for want of sufficient learning ability or prescribed proper behavior?  Are they returned to the so-called “horrors” of those so-called “bad or failing schools” and forced to languish in anonymous destitution?

The charter school industry has created a playin’-the-dozens model with the populations of America’s cities.  They claim to know what is best for those citizens.  It is an anachronistic, out of place system, just like slavery was.  And even though it’s an old and corrupt system, it’s hiding in plain sight.  Now is the time for all American citizens to call out and shun the chicanery of these exploiters.