The Bush Whitewash

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President Bush’s poll ratings were among the highest and lowest that modern presidents have ever received — but feelings about George W. Bush the person never fell as far as his job approval numbers.

Ask his staff or his friends to describe the president, and they’ll say “Normal, regular — if he moved in next door, you’d be friends.” The president made an effort to keep his life normal. He likes meetings to begin and end on time; he likes a schedule.

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 11, 2009

I’m increasingly irritated at National Public Radio’s coverage of current events. It’s always been, “Most Things Ignored,” of course, but the alternative media has grown so strong in recent years that it hardly matters. You can learn more from any given Fresh Air episode than you can from a week of “All Things Considered.” You can get a good outline of what’s going on from NPR but it’s no longer any more substantive than, say, the networks’ nightly news programs.

Even worse than the lack of substance is the substitution of an angry, argumentative tone for real analysis and understanding. It’s been particularly obvious in the last few weeks as the Bush propaganda machine attempts to re-tool the brutality and sheer stupid incompetence of his administration. Bush and company began their long campaign by creating a ‘good-old-boy’ image that they felt would be easy to market to their core constituency. He seems to be bringing it back one last time.

What drives me crazy about NPR is that the reporters seem to buy into the public relations campaign almost whole-cloth. Instead of talking about why the Bush administration is peddling their oldest story again, reporters seem to be “analyzing” the question of whether or not Bush is or is not a really fun guy. Some of the reports even seem to feel sorry for him. Meanwhile, of course, the economy continues to collapse, the wars go on, the horrors of Gaza go on.

Posted in: Language, Writing

How Change Happens

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Economic storms historically have prompted more adults to seek shelter in the classroom. But this time around, two-year colleges and private for-profit institutions are especially optimistic about attracting more students—and many of those older students will probably take courses online, according to one of the authors of a recent survey.

The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, released in November before the extent of the recession was clear, found that while all types of colleges anticipate enrollment bumps because of high unemployment, two-year and private for-profit institutions expect to increase their rolls more than others since they “tend to offer programs that have traditionally been tailored to serve working adults.

Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses, STEVE KOLOWICH, January 9, 2009

Step by step, we are creating a new education system without any sense of where we are going. The outlines of the new system have begun to become a little clearer, however. Much of this change is dependent on historical timing. There was the internet boom, which led to the dot-com crash, and then the housing boom. This created a new sort of infrastructure fed by an Utopian ideology that said these technologies ought to be in every home and classroom.

The internet boom jump-started the internet infrastructure, and the collapse of that bubble fed the housing boom, which bought everyone enough time to get these technologies to the point where their effects cannot be reversed. Utopia got us over the rough spots. Now that the housing bubble has burst, dragging the entire economy with it, more people will take advantage of the new infrastructure to use education to improve their chances on the job market, once the bust plays itself out.

All of this is just the public theater of change; behind the scenes, more profound transformations are taking place. As a profession and a public service, higher education has become lopsidedly bifurcated. An increasingly small minority have what was once a relatively secure position in full-time, tenure track positions. The majority do not. Similarly, the old liberal arts model of education threatens to become the privileged experience of a minority.

I understand the funding concerns but I don’t think this is a funding problem. if something is a priority– say, a bank or auto bail out– the money is available. The real questions have to do with the nature of jobs and job security and with the purposes of education. Conservative ideology has made the notion of job security seem antiquated. That magical force, “the market” has supposedly made such a thing impossible. Why should professors be any different?

And technology, rather than education in the old liberal arts mode, has the Utopian edge that pushes people into long term commitments and projects. Don’t get me wrong. I make my living teaching on the internet and I can see the reality of how these new infrastructure has made a certain kind of education more accessible. I worry, though, that as we are busily trying to get through this recession we are normalizing some deep cuts in our expectations.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, War, Writing

It Sucks to be Poor, Part II

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BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

Robert Sanders, Media Relations |02 December 2008

When I lived in the Philippines I quickly discovered that poverty had more subtle effects than I had imagined. Like most Americans, I had seen the television images of crumbling houses and starving kids with their swollen bellies. I am not sure if that is exactly what I expected to see in my little town of Conception, Tarlac, but it is pretty close. And there were certainly lots of crumbling houses and ill fed children. The house next door to mine was a single room, about 12 feet by 12 feet (perhaps 4 meters by 4 meters), occupied by an extended family that often included a dozen people.

That’s the least of it, of course. Maybe even more importantly, poverty had to do with infrastructure. There were the ongoing ‘brown outs’ and ‘black outs’ and minimal indoor plumbing. There were lots of bad roads and poorly running buses; there were no dentists in the rural areas, and no optometrists. People went blind with cataracts from the dust and lost their teeth from eating sugar cane raw. There were also families who had brand new cars; my district was the home district of the Aquino family so we had some good new roads, too. After a while, you noticed that many of the kids at school had small wounds that never quite healed.

They certainly had a lot of energy but these wounds were evidence of chronic, low-level malnutrition. As it turns out, you can be half or one-third or one-fourth starved to death. What happens, often enough, is that your body stops working very well. If you’re a kid, and like all kids, you are constantly scratching your knees or something, these tiny cuts never quite heal. Eventually, we also learned that this low-level malnutrition has cognitive effects as well. Among other things, kids don’t concentrate well when they are poorly fed. I wasn’t surprised, then, to find out that poverty also shapes so-called higher cognitive functions, too, such as creativity.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Writing