The Paradox of Education

Hola Everybody,
It’s been a while since I posted a blog and a lot of that has to do with being busy working my new gig and stressing over finding a place where I can rest my head. Right now, I have no place. I would submit that I’m the Best-Dressed Homeless Person in NYC! LOL It’s ok, I will persevere. Tonight, a friend who’s aware of my situation, let me use the hotel room she wasn’t going to use the last night of her stay here. Hey, I’m grateful. I’ve been sick these past few days and appreciate the chance to rest without worrying about this or that.

Most likely due to the film, I’m Not Your Negro, I’ve been seeing many white liberals express anguish over James Baldwin’s truth. I was lucky, I discovered Baldwin when I was a teen. I love James Baldwin and if you ever get a chance, pick up some of his non-fiction. It’s some of the most powerful socio-political writing evah... The following is an excerpt I try to post at least once a year.

A Talk to Teachers, by James Baldwin

Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child -- His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

* * *

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Stupid Question

Hola Everybody,
There’s much to write about these days. Corporate news now barely cares to vet their sources and clamor to follow in Fox News steps. Democrats have for the most part given up any pretense to stand for anything other than their corporate masters and those who drink their Kool Aid wander aimlessly experiencing defending the CIA and NSA and stumbling around in a psychotic break.

But I’m tired and most people really don’t give a good goddamn anyway... and we will continue to get less.

Questions 101

You see things that are and say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’
 -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

I was taught that the only stupid question is the one you don't ask.

Why? An excellent question… 

It’s a question I have been plagued by since as far back as I can remember. I’ve learned to ask other questions -- sometimes looking in the dark for newer questions, or questions not asked. I am a born skeptic, a doubter, a trouble maker by nature -- “un mas que jodes, un travesio.” At various times in my life I have been deemed unfit to live among the free and a bit deranged, to boot.

But along the way I have learned that questions are the very substance of who we are and what we do. I have learned that almost everything we do, every decision we make, is a response to an inner question. It’s unfortunate, I often think, that Questions 101 is not a regular feature in our classrooms. But then again, does the status quo really want to nurture questioning in our young?

One of my favorite books, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, deals with this issue of questions. In it a massive supercomputer is designed to give the ultimate, the absolute answer, an answer that would explain “God, life, the universe, and everything.” But the computer takes seven and a half million years to do this, and by the time the computer delivers the answer, everybody has forgotten the question! So, nobody remembers the ultimate question, but the ultimate answer is: 42.

This is amazing! Finally! The Answer! So wonderful is the answer that immediately a contest is held to see if anyone can come up with “The Question.” Many profound questions are submitted, but the final winner is: How many roads must a man walk down?

Reflecting about “spirituality, life, the universe, and everything” is pretty much what my life has been about -- the unexamined life, in my book, is an unworthy one. Of course, the answer may be not as clever as 42. Perhaps the answers deal with matter, life, mind, and spirit, and the underlying evolutionary currents that seem to unite them all in a pattern that connects.

For some time now, I have tried to embody this spirit of questioning. I guess part of my personal mission is to prod others to question, to look for the unasked questions and to try to understand who decides what questions will be asked and why. I think that’s part of my motivation for posting my rants -- I want people to ask, to question, to investigate their lives. If I were to die today, I would like to believe that I made some difference in the lives of the people I touch. I would want people to say, “He was a crazy motherfucker, but he cared, and he made me think. Or something like that.

In this crazy world all we can be sure of is the punch line to this grand Cosmic Joke we call life -- death. In the midst of all this uncertainty, we fumble for meaning or something that gives us a foundation of sorts. Sometimes this clinging is the core of our pain, sometimes having no meaning in one’s life is a key component to pain. So then, this is my meaning -- my mission: to rattle the cage a bit, to ask the unasked question and to ask you, dear reader and friend:

Why not?

We -- the curious, the apathetic, the wounded, the lonely and the happy -- are all somehow compelled to mass together in order to create meaning. We huddle together and tell our stories by the fire to ward off the dark. But in order to avoid the Kool-Aid we must dare to ask the questions that need asking and support each other somehow when the answers are harsh or painful.

I remember a time when that was called community... 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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Reflections on the Passing of Fidel Castro

Hola mi Gente,
I woke up late this morning (I’m struggling to get up) to discover that Fidel Castro passed away at the ripe old age of 90. My newsfeeds and social media platforms are rife with anti-Castro propaganda. Let’s be clear here, the only reason the corporate media demonizes Castro is not because of his alleged human rights violations, but because he stood up to US imperialism and lived to talk about it. If the US was so concerned with human rights, it would not be enslaving and murdering innocent people here and across the globe.

I have two things to say. One: Are the Cuban people better off today than they were before the revolution? I think the facts (i.e., healthcare, literacy, life expectancy, autonomy, etc.) clearly show they are. Secondly, yeah, Fidel Castro was so evil he offered to send doctors and medical supplies to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, while George W. Bush, who declined his offer, watched poor black people die from the safety of an airplane.

That last one was me being facetious, yeah. Along with Castro’s passing, there will be the usual “debates” on socialism and communism (most US citizens don’t know the difference). Along with those discussions will come the inevitable expression/ belief that capitalism is not only superior, but an inevitable feature of the human condition. Fidel and I disagree… 

Capitalism and Rape

Greed is good.
-- Gordon Gekko, Wall Street

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography 

[Note: A blind adherence to the virtues of “free markets” is symptomatic to neoliberal thought. Below, in an essay I adapted several years ago, I try to uncover the faulty reasoning behind the dogma.]

Consider the following:

Rape is a basic and necessary expression of human nature. Sexual assaults have been present in every society since the dawn of time. It is the natural drive of man to reproduce, to compete successfully for advantage in the marketplace of life and evolution. In fact, it is this innate compulsion to reproduce that motivates man to do anything productive and worthwhile in the first place.

It is this competitive drive that motivates man to aspire to greatness. Can you imagine men striving for greatness were they not motivated by their drive to reproduce by any means? Of course not, because the drive to reproduce is at the very core of mankind’s fundamental nature. As long as we disregard childish “God” superstitions and recognize that a man is ultimately responsible only to and for himself, we therefore recognize that any measures that attempt to suppress this natural and intrinsic drive to reproduce by any means are inherently wrong.

To suppress sexual assaults is the perverse anti-human dream of the superstitious rabble. In fact, no human society has successfully eliminated rape, despite innumerable measures designed to curb sexual assaults. If man were only truly free to pursue this integral part of his nature we would walk as the masters of the Earth that we are.

Anyone with a relatively functioning forebrain will see that this is a painfully faulty and dangerous chain of reasoning. Just because the drive to reproduce is inherent in humans, it doesn’t follow that sexual assault and rape stem from that drive and are a part of human nature. Furthermore, that every society has been beset by sexual assault and none has successfully eliminated rape, doesn’t necessarily mean that sexual assault and rape are things that should be encouraged, or that there wouldn’t be disastrous and apocalyptic consequences were people given carte blanche to rape.

Now, reread the above but this time replace every occurrence of the words “sexual assault” with the words “free markets,” and replace every occurrence of the word “rape” with “capitalism,” and every occurrence of the word “reproduce” with “acquire wealth.” It is now word-for-word the position of economic neoliberal types such as Clinton, Trump, and Obama. You will find this same line of thought in rationales against universal healthcare, for example, and free postsecondary education.

Well, boys and girls: what have we learned? First, my aim here is not merely to equate capitalism with rape (not a bad area to explore in future writings). Rather, my goal is to point out fallacious reasoning. Certain things might be inherently part of human nature or cannot be completely eliminated, but that isn’t a sufficient condition for a logically cohesive argument that should be encouraged. If you want to argue that they should be encouraged, you must give other reasons.

The other reason for this is the unthinking and reactionary response of “socialism doesn’t work,” which displays an ignorance of the enormous and diverse body of economic and ethical thought outside of the current U.S. political and moral paradigm.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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