Politics and What It Is Not: Letter to "Democracy In Decline," 08/10/2014. Submitted 08/25/2015.

Weighing in on the statewide report on Civics, the Bee’s “Democracy In Decline” squanders a momentous opportunity to criticize the report’s limited reflections on Politics while failing to appreciate persistent institutional disdain for popular participation.

Crucially, the article and the report neglect that Politics is just as much about how we manage, share, and mediate the space between us in (ideally) mutually-beneficial ways as it is about policy or law or institution, something Jefferson knew well.

And while the report and the article boringly continue to unreflectively worship ‘our’ “forefathers” for being “extremely adept” at turning their radical privilege into productive “Civic” conversation, it hardly notes Jefferson’s ultimate inability to Constitutionally-furnish (and protect) forums known as Wards (spaces of communal, popular participation).

Finally, the article – like many – painfully scapegoats “complainers” as a primary enemy of a verdant democracy, disregarding that they are a byproduct of a polity that systemically fails to provide its own citizens with ample, gainful and accessible participatory opportunities, remarkably suggesting we could achieve Ultimate Citizenry status by voting regularly-enough on other's initiatives or by more religiously showing up in court, all welcome prescriptions but which still, nevertheless fail to effectively involve Me and You.

Gravity: A Familiar Yet Foreign Force

As a kid, gravity made sense. It was what kept me from falling up when I looked at the sky, upside-down, from the school play bars. Yet what perplexed me was what I read about it in textbooks. I wondered: why did I find this concept so un-attractive? It seemed like there was a ‘gravity’ that we felt and then a ‘Gravity’ that we studied. And so my curiosity was seeded.

Mathematically, ‘Gravity’ is the force between two objects, measured by ‘G,’ the universal gravitational constant, multiplied by the mass of the two objects, and divided by the square of the separating distance.

But where do I fit? Am I lodged in between ‘G’ (gravitational force) and ‘R’ (distance)? Or perhaps, am I some product of the two? Perhaps I’m object 1 or 2, then. But how can I tell? And which one? At this problem, I felt the dizzying need to consult a physicist to prescribe a formula for my existential-physical crisis.

These ideas plagued me. Intuitively, they felt limited, but any freshmen ‘physician’ would tell me that I’m crazy to distrust the Gravity formula: I mean, something keeps me on the ground, right?

However, it all made sense when I read Merleau-Ponty’s, Eye and Mind. Sure, he admits, science is “admirably active, ingenious, and bold” but, it also “manipulates things and gives up living in them”. Was he implying that scientific language, while useful, might actually obscure what I immediately see and feel? Might not be my personal language for understanding my everydayness, my world?

I realized that I am more than what a scientist tells me; I have and am a physical body, but I also experience this body, and my experience and what it tells me are my own.

Still, the answer left me wanting.  What about the growing distance - and diminishing gravity - between scientific descriptions and my felt experience? Maybe it wasn’t that one framework was right and the other was wrong; perhaps something else was happening here. Another thinker, Hannah Arendt, helped me work through some of these complex feelings. In her view, science’s complex language prevails for its utility and universality, for being useful and applicable to many spaces in the world (This same language that vaulted us into outer space and endowed us with the super human power to annihilate ourselves irrevocably). Scientists created these symbols (like G (gravity) and R(distance)) to ease the process of speaking with one another about complex concepts, and while it originated in ordinary language, it have since departed from it, along with the resemblance it once had to individual experience. This explains what I was feeling as a child.

So, how do we reconcile the gravity-defying, skyscraper-building capacity of science with the hollow feel of its calculations? How can we meet science’s cumbersome language with our everyday? My answer: we can’t. They’re speaking different languages in different frequencies, like Chinese and English, and it’s not that one is right and the other is wrong: they just both have their purposes, each of which is necessary to fashion our shared, human world. Moreover, we couldn’t bear to lose either, so we have to compromise in mindfulness of when to use the one language and when to use the other. Like being in San Francisco or Beijing.

In this way, I’d like to think (perhaps self-satisfyingly) that my childhood intuitions weren’t wrong after all: ‘gravity’ is not ‘Gravity’.  But, lemme tell ya, none of this made that fall from the school ground playbars any softer when I hit the ground.

Thanks gravity. And science.

References

1. Tipler, Paul A. 1995. Physics For Scientists and Engineers. Worth Publishers. 3rd ed.

2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2

3. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pg. 4

On Our Engagements

I concern over how quickly many of us purport to digest and/or comprehend something, when often that very judgment prevents us from taking the third or fourth read that might yield other insights, the sort that might incite a much more radical revaluation of our previous thoughts. It is in and through the first or second engagements that we apply and reproduce (or insinuate) cliched and established paradigms and judgments; but it is in and with third, fourth, even ninth that we begin to how a text is constructed, what makes it unique, where it comes from and how riddled with contradictions it is. Now, we cannot all be experts in everything we read (and hence give such time), but it is worth noting what we lose when we read an SAT passage and pretend that five minutes will tell us 'enough,' which may be sufficient for the questions but is not at all what we need to think ourselves back to health.

Benjamin considered the superficiality of our engagements in his essay on technological reproduction. Popular art often exhibits the trait of closeness, of being readily accessible to us by fitting within established artistic and literary conventions: pictorially and otherwise; while it often also exhibits the trait of being supportive or elaborative of predominate ideologies, although, admittedly doing so with new flares or flourishes (that intrigue and entrance new readers but do not seek to fall from the tree). Novelty is avoided, while 'newness' is praised. And the novelty that is quickly fades.

I think this thought as I read through Adam Fell's Dear Corporation, his latest poetry compilation. The book, which I won't describe here at length in anticipation of a later review or consideration, is embraced by a dark cover that ends with an inscription by him, observing sublimely: "some choices are not really choices at all." What appears to be is not always is, and when we come closer to something, we begin to see its details, its fissures, its blemishes and wrinkles. And when we think more narrowly on our own paths, we begin see the outlines of anticipation and predictability, where one moment follows from the next, although always with the possibility of new and different iteration present within the germs of preceding ones. Nevertheless, however, the germs of the novel and of beginnings must from somewhere. And that somewhere is someone: it is us and where have been and will be.

A Long Day In The (Sub)Mines

No blogging today, but I'm thinking about getting a Subtips (and gripes) website going. We'll see where it goes (and I'll keep you updated of and about its progress).

On this sub site, I would discuss best practices, helpful quieting techniques, ideal conditions, what to bring to prepare, how to avoid overpreparing, how to avoid coming off as too self-aggrandizing and how to focus less on yourself and more on the overall maintenance of the class (which should be the vanishing point around which all actions take place for all teachers but might be even more difficult for subs). I'm still relatively inexperienced myself, but perhaps I could speak with others to see what they think, too, and then maybe I can put something together.

Toodles.

Ali on War, War on Ali

In an indignant and defiant defense of his draft orders refusal, Muhammad Ali comments "I ain’t got nothin’ against them Viet Congs," and his refusal - and justification for the refusal - continues to chill me, even today, when we feel that it is now all the more risky to put forth one's political views or to name ourselves as public owners of such views for fear of their consequences.

Ali's act shows us what it means to stand on principle, while his selfless, risky act shows us that it is not only the politicians who need and should be political.

In so few words, Ali says much about the content of his disapproval for a body politic that instrumentally utilizes and deploys its citizens in pursuit of removed, questionably justifiable geopolitical projects and political machinations for which we may neither personal involvement nor care.

Being a boxer, a fighter, he is paid to face off against those with whom he often has little actual dispute. But in this case, he desires to take off his gloves and does so to show his unwillingness to perpetuate unjust, unfair processes that coerce individuals into obedient and 'justified' violent acts in order to preserve a polity (or any system or organization, really) that polices them at every turn.

For this reason, politicians, in fact, should hardly be the only to justifiably dispute the regrettable decisions that a state, and its legislators make. It takes little more than an understanding that there is no personal dispute here, on Ali's part (not to mention the moral prescriptions of his religious obligations), that the issue is fabricated or constructed in one way or another. There is also the more than likely explanation that their work is the product of parochial interests who exercise political will, a power dynamic that persists even today.3

He hints also at his own pacifist leanings, implying that any kind of force would need heavy justification, and in his case, nobody has provided sufficient reason for feeling as much, just legal obligations and coercive force. Just as importantly, Ali appears to lament our own ability to make these decisions for ourselves, as our country reserves the right to decide what a legitimate enough cause is for us to perish in its wake

"No," he succinctly elaborates "I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end."

He acknowledges the profound importance of making a stand where he can, wherever that might be, and, given his own image-capital - the fact that he is very well-known - he is able to wield a kind of persuasive, personal-brand-logo-infused power that another making the statement might lack.

Ali's is a reading of the state, and the ability of the individual, however defined, to oppose it (but to do so nonviolently) when their respective priorities are incompatible and when the state charges its citizens with violent, deplorable, condemnable acts and utilizes its own powers of coercion to advance these interests, often even at the cost and to the disadvantage of its own people.

Ali is a model for us all, to do what we can with what we have at the right time in order to stand on what ideals we hold dear, for we are as much our principles as we are anything else. Forsaking those for some other ends, then, is a way of forsaking ourselves.

Granted, we must accomplish this strategically, and this is our particular challenge, something that few others have felt like us before. Knowing when and for what to expend our personal capital in the service of our ideals is essential, as expending our capital means thrusting ourselves into the public sphere where we may be scrutinized, but also means subjecting ourselves to possible examination and policing by enforcement bodies that hold sway over our futures in some way or another.

In this way, Ali shows us that we both have an obligation to our community to disclose ourselves and our beliefs, not to mention a dear fidelity to them. This is not to say that we should do so fundamentally, but by bringing them to the public realm, we effectively do the opposite: we are subjecting them to scrutiny and welcoming the discourse that might come with conversing with others on the matters.

I am the Greatest that ever was?

I really tire of this "greatest novelist" or greatest anything talk: it is neither accurate - in that no such standard could ever really be created, because creating a standard for greatness would have to be created by someone greater (most likely) - and because it has all the worst effects:

it appears to make us feel that we need all aspire to such things, exactly the realization of the failed dream of productive, constructive competition that capitalism's logic continues to furnish.

Moreover, it fails to acknowledge that any kind of greatness is the outcome of no eternal, objective judgment but largely suffused with irrefutable political alliances. That is, what becomes known and great is that which is acceptable within prevailing standards and political persuasions of the day: the result of that which is considered worth recognition based on the existent distribution of the sensible (what is shown and what is kept invisible).

It is again the logic of capitalism rearing its deceitfully distant head, convincing us of the need to become something we may not be, possibly losing ourselves and our aspirations in the process of being teased by the temptations of 'Greatness.'

On Poverty

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/264850945/almost-no-poor-nations-by-2035-thats-what-bill-gates-says

Can we merely assume that time and economic projection will obliterate poverty altogether?

Should we instead talk about poverty as persistent and recurrent social equality produced by particular relations of capital?

Why are some nations labelled 'poor,' and what are the effects of this rhetorical assignation?

How is Gate's advancing a particular view of the global economy in this seemingly inert declamation of poverty?