...and I shake the Dirt from my Sandals...

Here's an interesting article my friend sent me-- I didn't write it. The guy who did (and credit is definitely due) is at the bottom--Robert Jensen.

There's a link at the end of one of the paragraphs (this one:http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2). Don't overlook it. It will shock you as well.

There is no freedom in war.


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ZNet Commentary
Constraining history/controlling knowledge August 14, 2006
By Robert Jensen

One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.

By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.

Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared that "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as "knowable, teachable and testable."

Florida's lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of U.S. history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on "the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy"), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that "factual" and "constructed" are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That's the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.

For example, it's a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That's interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.

It's also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one's answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region's crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?

Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 presidential election, Florida's Republican secretary of state removed 57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons and not eligible to vote. It's a fact that at least 90 percent were not criminals -- but were African American. It's a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and why that happened?http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much Florida's elected representatives might resist the notion. The real question is: How effectively can one defend one's construction? If Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend it.

One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: "We can't control what the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren't exposed to such nonsense."

The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is "Stalinist," a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that's what I learned in history class.

People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States.

But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in world history, we can't completely dictate the shape of the world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the scope of one's inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.

Is history "knowable, teachable and testable"? Certainly people can work hard to know -- to develop interpretations of processes and events in history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about those views. And students can be tested on their understanding of conflicting constructions of history.

But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu .

The Philosophy of Comedy

We are in a room, taking a test. The first question on the fourth page, the first page of opinion-based questions (completely optional, so as to get a random sampling of those that are taking this test… We'll call it the XMAS exam), is thus:

Choose the MOST offensive sentence, (a), (b), or (c)

A) "that dumb nigger is just as stupid as any old kike. they're running this fucking place."

B) "you dumb cunt, where did you learn to fucking write like that? who the fucking hell taught you that kind of gutter language? my god are you a pussy or what!"

C) "god is dead."

To some it may have been A, the most racially offensive of the three; or B, the one with the most "foul language;" or C, the one that proclaims the death of one’s religious head. The point is that swearing is different to different people, more offensive to some than others, and other words more offensive to some than others.

I believe that swearing is a merely contextual pact between a person and his fellow man—the understanding that to some nigger may be offensive, to some spic, to some fuck, to some cunt, to some faggot. Not all offensive words are offensive to all people at any given time. For example, I'm not offended by any of the words in this essay.

But as it goes, because of color, derogatory terms like Gook or Spic or Slant-eye, or cracker or nigger or Jew may be offensive; because of stature, midget may be offensive; because of orientation, Faggot or Homo or Gay or Fag-boy or Nancy-boy may be offensive; to some, because of up bringing, shut up and stupid and Satan and liberal and democrat may be offensive; to a government official, Marxist or communist or sadist may be offensive.

Now were you offended by all those words? If you were, then you need grief counseling, because one word should not affect your entire day, that is just absurd. Sentences, sure, they can be offensive, but one word? "I hate you," has more weight than "I" "hate" and "you" alone, just as "fuck off" has more weight that "fuck" has alone or the phrase "go away" even. The only exceptions to this rule are the words in answer (A), derogatory words. I'm completely willing to allow anyone to go ape-shit on a racist—you have my blessing.

Another thought is in comedy--that great enigma where a person can get up on a stage and say anything they want. There are comedians who stake their career on the racially offensive like Carlos Mencia, who has had jokes about Holy Wars and Arabs owning 7-11's and the like; there are those like Dane Cook who stake their career on the stupidity of people; or even Dave Attell who stoops for laughs by utilizing the cultural sexual awkwardness when he talks about romantic masturbation and Glade Plugins making a bathroom smell like "Lemons and Assholes." The entire comedic philosophy is to "know your audience," that is: not all jokes will work with all audiences, that some audiences are more sensitive than others; and that's what I believe Paul was calling us to do in Ephesians 4:29 when he stated, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." According to their needs is the middle phrase, those words that are beneficiary. And, often, said curse words are not helpful but merely passing words to give time for thinking. Thus, the only universal curse words, for now, are derogatory terms, but even those are relative--we could list all the words for all the races in all the languages in all the world, and even then it wouldn’t cover sign language. Therefore, there is no universal derogatory statement either, only that which is known and used by regions and hemispheres.

Curse words are those four-letter English words that are supposed to be deplorable to all of American society. You know the ones. You know how they're used (ie: fuck the fucking fucker), and are these either beneficiary or derogatory or negative in any way? No. They're just cultural words that are inserted for fucking emphasis, or to describe the way some bitch was acting, or how God should damn something, or to insinuate rough copulation, or how shit's on your front porch, on fire or to describe a woman's vagina or how much of a cunt someone is or pussy or twat or dick.

Then why do we have an Federal Communications Commission that fines tens of thousands of dollars for what is offensive? It is a panel of presumable white, upper-class males who can only think of what they wouldn't say in front of children or in front of their friends on the golf course. But in all reality, should this decision be in the hands of a panel of government workers? Or should it be in the hands of the parents, the pastors, the congregation, the self? Although I am under the impression that all humanity is too stupid to know their face from their ass (myself included, I get them confused all too often), I still think that there need not be any social restraint--control their money, sure, tax them out the ass, but don’t tell then what they can and cannot watch! I mean, how many people really care about a TV-MA rating when it’s truly the advertisers that control the entire situation? On HBO, an additional-pay-channel, they can have a TV-MA show like "Carnivàle" and show full frontal nudity on a weekly basis, but a TV-MA show on basic cable like "South Park" dare not even say "fuck" even though they could show vaginas with that rating--why don’t they? because the advertisers would not support a show that people would consider pornographic--because the advertisers control the line. And on channels like ShoTime and HBO and Starz, there are no advertisers, and thus no line.

The FCC is bullshit.

Then you have to take into account that people are more sensitive to nigger than faggot, and why is that? Aren't they both on the same level--the same offense? If someone is born gay, and someone is also born black, then aren’t they of the same caliber of offense? There seems to be too much fucking emphasis on those tired colloquialisms that we don't take time to emphasize and teach about all racism--sure, I knew nigger was bad, but what about spic and faggot and gook? They're as obscure as discussing foreplay during the sex talk. Too awkward, let him figure it out on his own. The little cunt probably won't learn it until he at least 13. Then it's engrained, then it's cultural, then everything uncool is homosexual, then everything cowardly is vaginal, then everything tough and mean is phallic...

According to my needs as a writer, the common anachronism for the cocksucker with too much gall and too much self-loathing, I am supposed to point these things out. Not all swearing is bad, you know, just that which, if you adhere to Paul’s aphorism, does not uplift.

So, then, you've just gotta know your audience. And you're mine.

Little Miss Sunshine Review (Spoilers ho)

Last month, I went to see an Inconvenient Truth (another movie I can recommend, and not just because I'm some socialist cunt), which carried the trailer for Little Miss Sunshine. I was psyched to see it from the moment I heard Olive, the little girl, say that Steve Carrell's falling in love with a boy was "silly". I was hooked and, aside from the threat of global warming, it was all I thought about after the movie.

And so, hearing that it had opened this past Friday in Los Angeles (Wide release August 18th, about 600 theaters), I decided to drive the fifty miles into Hollywood to see it at the Arclight, quite possibly the best theater I've ever been too--totally worth the extra dollar-fifty to not see any cheesy advertisements or hear shitty music before the movie (take note AMCs and Regals). The ushers began to walk away, and then one went to the front and announced, personally, the whole "Silence your goddam cell phones" instead of the Cingular sponsored message on screen or those cheesy faux movie scenes that are "ruined" by a cell phone in the audience. Quaint, yes, but the whole personal touch of someone requesting it made me want to shut the fuck up that much more.

The trailers were forgettable, nothing about The Fountain, and I was too psyched about the movie at hand.

Then the movie began. 105 minutes of pure dark-comedy in its greatest form. Abigail Breslin, who plays Olive, performed wonderfully, as did Steve Carrell as a homosexual uncle who tried to commit suicide, but not about his own homosexuality--his whole explanation of his situation is rather sad but you can't help but laugh. The way in which this movie played out, not doping up on heavy subplots about morality and the acceptance of homosexuality or silence because of Nietzche or some shit about another girl that MUST be beaten, was a wonderful execution--all that was expected to dredge the movie was relinquished.

When Grandpa dies, and they sneak him out the window and stuff it into the trunk--that was gold. I was laughing my ass off along with everyone in the theater, then how they had to push the car to get it going out of there because they didn't have time to get a new clutch. Pure, unadulterated laughs.

When it all ties into when Olive dedicates her final performance to her grandpa, and when the announcer asks her, "And where is your dad now? Is he in the audience?" and she emphatically, happily replies (as if it's normal), "He's in our trunk." It was quite possibly one of the most contextually funny things I have ever heard.

Everything played off well, and I can't really think of anything that was done wrong. That's honesty. I've held off on writing this review so I could try and find something wrong with it. Nothing. Greg Kinnear played well as the determined asshole father who turns around and propels the movie with reason to why he's doing it.

Much better than the last Sunshine film I saw...that one with Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey...

I guess it's simple: Get your ass to a showing of Little Miss Sunshine. (10\10)

mewithoutyou

and mewithoutYou at Cornerstone 2006, performing a new song, possibly their best yet: