Isn't it ironic?

Isn't it ironic that forcing our way through issues and being forced means noone ever taking responsiblity, really?

It makes total sense to me, really. The question is when we will face up.

Love,
Ben

The political philosophy of Austin Powers

Final scene: Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.

Austin Powers: I've got you now, Dr. Evil.

Dr. Evil: Well done, Mr. Powers. We're not so different, you and I. However isn't it ironic that the very things that you stand for - free love, swinging, parties - are all, now in the 90's, considered to be...evil.

Austin Powers: No man. What we swingers were rebelling against is uptight squares like you, whose bag was money and world domination. We were innocent, man. If we had known the consequences of our sexual liberation, we would have done things differently, but the spirit would have remained the same. It's freedom, baby. Yeah.

Dr. Evil: Face it. Freedom failed.

Austin Powers: Freedom didn't fail. Right now, we have freedom and responsibility. It's a very groovy time.

Sadly, his Shagginess spoke too soon. It turns out that the current era is about neither. But how nice a world of freedom and responsibility might be.

Groovy, baby.

Love,
Ben

Fairy tales and bikini briefs

I think I just heard some of the most profound bullshit that I have ever heard in this long, foolish period of romanticizing force.

We have a paraprofessional who drives the kids (and her colleagues, too often) crazy. She's abrupt. She's too often rude. She's far too dependent on others to make decisions for her. The kids hate her guts, is the truth, some of which she has earned.

And she's gotten a lot better. I've stood by her when others were ready to throw her overboard because I felt like everyone needs a chance to learn and get better at life.

And I just listened to this woman say that she was well-behaved as a kid because her parents forced her to behave.

And I'm thinking, "So what fucked that all up?"

Because she's got a long way toward learning to be a better behaved adult, nevertheless a kid. Many, if not all, of the adults who are caught up in the most popular craze in child-rearing - forcing, people, and among them, your kids to be good - are like this, in some relative degree. As were their parents. And their parents before them. And their parents before them. It's not really the most original idea. And it never really has delivered on the goods that it promises.

It's a big load of horseshit, is what it is. It's a lot of people pretending to be better than they really are. So of course they know what to tell everyone else to do because look how great and infallible they turned out. It's the most vomit-inducing form of undeserved self-congratulation that I've ever watched a whole society of adults ever engage in.

And this woman had the gall to say to a group of fairly real world-savvy adults that she couldn't misbehave as a kid because she was forced otherwise. And this is a woman who has a hard time getting along with teachers, some of the nicer folks in the world, nevertheless with students, who think of her as rude and overbearing, which she too often is.

The sad thing about not being honest with yourself is that it is you who suffers for that, ultimately. When you claim to be a better person that you really are to justify whatever it is that you want to justify, you are the one who starts to lose touch with reality, as your defenses for your self-image loses track of the reality of who you really are.

We all do this. Me too. I was just thinking about it yesterday morning, actually. All the ways I have to work to be the kind of person and man I would like to be. And who I am absent those qualities in the meantime. I have a long way to be my most positive image for myself.

And so do we all. Which is exactly why we are all in such need of looking after the beams in our own eyes more than forcing out the splinters in the eyes of others.

This is where Twain was brilliant and I have such a long way to go. To give us all needed shit, all in good fun and in loving seriousness, about what jackasses we so often are, especially when we are getting all worked up about one thing or another, and often when we are getting worked up about our children.

We're all a bunch of petty emperors, bossing everyone around and wearing nothing but our bikini briefs. And telling everyone about what saints we were as children because our parents had the sense to shackle us to the prevailing moral and legal order.

And the really big question is, "If we're really all so damn good, then why has the world turned out to be such shit so much of the time?"

And the other really big question is, "If this is a route that has been tried and true in the past, and has never really gotten us to the promised land, why do we keep pretending like we've crossed the Red Sea?"

I know, I know. We haven't done it enough. One elusive day, we will have used enough force and imposed enough of our will and coerced our way to higher ground and then it will finally be enough and the world will live happily ever after.

Nothing wrong with a fairy tale. But I think I'll stick with Twain.

Love,
Ben

What I want more than anything else, right now

I want someone to be nice to me.

I want a nice girl to spend quality time with. I want to go down to Wichita and hang out at the River Festival, maybe.

I want to spend some relaxing time with someone who is more interested in being decent than in being right. I like debates about important issues. And my experience is that the people who feel most comfortable with debating and arguing openly are the most sensitive and decent of the people I know.

And I want a girl like that to spend some quality time with. Lay in bed and talk about nothing. And everything. Watch a movie. Take a roadtrip. Bitch about my lousy, stressful day with someone who can be a good listener and give me a hug and not lecture me about knowing what I got myself into. Long, deep kisses with someone more passionate about being in love and about how people are doing than about any other self-righteous cause.

I want some kindness from a girl who treats everyone decently, so that I know that I can count on her treating me decently, more often than not.

If you make me choose between nice and smart, I'll choose nice, because I'd rather have someone be decent to me than someone I can verbally spar with. I'm afraid I will never really feel close to someone unless she is nice and smart and have a little courage in the world, though. Because I need someone who understands the slings and arrows of my life to be able to have any reasonable level of empathy.

I want a nice girl, because I've had quite enough of a people being rough with me. I think everyone has, no matter how tough they might be.

I want someone to be nice to me. Because having people be jaded or mean or calloused just doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. And it certainly doesn't put me to bed at night.

Love,
Ben

Why the blog?

I've only got a few moments to blog, here, because I have mucho work. This blog comes from a meme from Carson Brackney at Content Done Better, who has another blog meme that I have been meaning and wanting to do around pornography and the internet that I will try to find time to blog on this weekend, perhaps.

But, for today, the question is, "Why blog?"

Actually the questions were:

To whom are you blogging?
To whom do you want to be blogging?
Am I talking to you?

But I'm going to address them and sum them up in a more general question, "Why blog?"

Here's the why and whom I am writing to in a nutshell:

There really is only one thing in the world that I really care about, other than falling in love and having and caring for a family, and being a decent human being. And that is contributing something to the world long after my stay here. The only thing that anyone can contribute that really matters, as far as I'm concerned, is some sort of wisdom. Other stuff is great, but less important than some sort of wisdom, I think, since it is wisdom that presumably offers us a better, more fulfilling, more decent life. You can buy a lot of stuff, and seek thrills, and get your way around other stuff. But none of that offers the higher values of life that make it worth living.

Also, there is far too much needless tragedy in the world. I want to minimize my contributions to the unnecessary tragedies in the world, which reflection offers us the opportunity to do, and I want to write in a way that might teach others in the future to avoid the mistakes of current generations too stubborn or too self-centered to face their failures and shortcomings. We can avoid our own shortcomings all we please, I'm learning. But future generations can see them more clearly, because there's no reason for them to defend us. Especially when we're responsible, even inadvertantly for unnecessary tragedy. I've done enough bad in my life, as we all have, no matter how little we may reflect on our past behavior, to know not to want to contribute to any more. And I've done enough good in my life to know that this is the only thing worth contributing.

So I am writing to perhaps less jaded future generations, as much as to my own, jaded or not, to talk about everything that is and was great about this current period and current generations and to leave a record of all of the consequences of the poor choices of this current prevailing generation, of my own generation, my own choices included, and probably younger generations, as I age, by my judgment, as best as I have to offer.

It makes me sad that there are so few opportunities to talk more honestly about all of the experiences I have had that leave me with conclusions that seem counterintuitive or too good to be true to some. But life is life, and I speak as honestly as I can without being too foolish.

I do speak to current generations - average people, political leaders, journalists, policy, social science and any scholars concerned with people, teachers, parents, law enforcement and military personell and experts, historians, political junkies and wonks, and anyone who is interested in how people are more honestly than we might say out loud to one another and to understand, better, why so many important problems in our world go unresolved despite so many protestations that people care about solving them.

But I am also aware of the limitations of this current generation to speak only to them. Their pride. Their propensity to be tough rather than wise. Their propensity to either learn lessons the hard way or not at all, depending on what makes them look better, too often. Their propensity to look for evidence to support their biases rather than consider that they might be wrong. Their propensity to look more after themselves or those they identify with rather than the interests of everyone, as much as possible, and then scratch their heads and wonder why they don't understand why people respond to them and their efforts the way they do. And, most of all, this generation, their propensity to not give much or enough of shit about others around them, and then wonder why their lack of empathy has everyone pissed off at them or uncooperative or unresponsive to their demands or their examples, so often.

The next generation will have these same failings, undoubtedly. But what they will lack is the pride involved with defending the failings of the current generation. And they will, generally, be subject to the self-centeredness of the current generation, and have some empathy for others who are subject to it, today.

When I was in grad school, I asked myself a lot, "Why, 30 years after Abraham Maslow had passed away and his influence was so clearly pronounced in psychology and throughout the social sciences, which have influence on every professional field in the world, have we still ignored so many of his most basic ideas, especially around the need for love and freedom in resolving so many of the world's most serious problems? Why, 2000 years after Jesus' crucifixion, almost 60 years after the assassination of Mohatma Ghandi, and almost 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, have we all failed to take seriously the teachings of these men to love one another and treat humanity as we would want to be treated?"

Why do the words of wise men so often get ignored?

And the answer to that question is that each person in each new generation, having studied or taken seriously or considered that wisdom or not, each live new lives, borne of each of our choices, wise or not. Often, perhaps more often than not, our choices are not so terribly wise. That is how each of us learns many of the even very important lessons in life, after all, assuming we learn them, that is (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Queda, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, the Chinese Communist Party, and many others of the worlds' most despicable and self-centered despots and petty tyrants challenge my hope that everyone will learn the most serious wisdom humanity has to offer, though even the better members of humanity challenge this hope, for me, too often). And often, it takes many, sometimes far too tragically far too many, of our bad choices before we face up to our need to make better choices.

Wisdom is not always heeded. Far too frequently, it is not. Which doesn't make it any less wise. It just makes it unheeded, until wiser choices prevail (or they don't, which lead to stagnation, for a culture, and stagnation and hardship and perhaps worse, for individuals).

That does make me very sad when the wisdom involved can save lives or avoid harship or avoid unecessary tragedy, especially when that tragedy is imposed by some upon others whose interests and concerns they often insensitively ignore.

So I write for everyone, including those I just described, but especially for future generations who will have no interest in defending our mistakes and poor judgment and failures of compassion (except, perhaps, as it defends their own mistakes and insensitivity, just as we do today and will do every generation as we learn to let go of our most serious mistakes that we reinforce together as a culture).

I also write for friends and family and people who might be interested, for people in my fields and who might learn something, and for anyone who might be interested in my life or thoughts.

The truth is that I want to be blogging and writing for everyone. I especially want to be blogging to generate a much more substantial debate and discussion about how we are handling so many of our contemporary problems in more liberal and less liberal democratic and nondemocratic societies (societies, that, thankfully, look more and more alike in ways that promote peoples' freedom, and, sadly, look more and more alike in ways that curb that freedom). I am learning about my limits within that discussion. But I am also completely clear about the failure of so many alternative approaches that are not connected to more personal, more honest, and more thoughtful discussions and debates that are more genuinely concerned with resolution of serious issues and not just defending failures.

Am I talking to you?

Undoubtedly, I am. No matter who you might be. I am not looking to cater to peoples' biases, though I would like to write in ways that are as easily accessible as possible and do some writing that is as much entertainment as substantial.

I do wonder, often, when I am so frequently out of step with popular opinion, if I am writing for anyone at all, since popular opinion prevails, generally, whether we think that is a good thing or not. Am I just a kook? Or a kindly fool?

I ask that question of myself probably more often than people ask it or think it of me.

And every time I do, I think, "Where is the stronger argument?"

I am, ultimately, always amenable to a stronger argument. Always. I think I can be proud of being one of the most genuinely open-minded and open-hearted people I know, even as I have no interest in being naive or a fool.

And I've not seen stronger arguments than those I've made around those issues where I am out of step with conventional wisdom or popular opinion. I see a world that makes mutually reinforcing assertions that they believe, in the moment, amount to something truer than they actually are. And I see a world that does that persistently, and mistakes it for wisdom, persistently. As do I, frankly. So none of us can claim any monopoly on insight, at all.

But I am always open to a stronger argument. Always. Because that is where wisdom and knowledge and the strongest understandings are derived.

So, I suppose the reality is that my blog is most especially written for those who care about and are interested in distinguishing where the stronger arguments are at. Not in affirming my arguments, necessarily, but providing stronger counterarguments when they don't find stronger arguments here.

Ultimately, the opinions I care about the most are those who have and consistently make the strongest arguments and those who understand best the matters of life that I care and write about. Often those are one and the same. Often they are not.

And, as, if not more importantly, the people I write for are those who have better arguments to offer when and if I am wrong. Because those people help me grow and learn and see my mistakes.

In fact, what I crave most in life is people who have things to teach me because of my the blind spots that are now and perpetually in my own judgment (and all of our judgments, no matter how much we might pride ourselves otherwise; a more appropriate use of the word pride I cannot imagine than assuming otherwise).

That's why I blog. And write. And argue. And debate. And discuss. And share.

Because I want to care and know. And I want others to care and know along with me. Far more than I will ever want to be right or be rewarded.

I've got to eat and work. Someone's got to pay the bills.

Love,
Ben

A personal breakthrough

I had a huge breakthrough this weekend with some work and personal priorties that has made a huge difference in getting some stuff done that I was feeling overwhelmed by and which, along with a conversation I had with a girl in a class I'm taking, gives me some very important insight into struggles that kids have in school.

The breakthrough was that I have felt perpetually overwhelmed by a long to-do list that a whole host of people - parents, administrators, other teachers, students - seem to perpetually add to, often, in the case of the administrators and other teachers - without any real input from me about whether the priorities are manageable for me or not. I've tried talking about it with administrators, but often to no avail. It's a problem that all of the teachers I work with struggle with, but I've been looking to both resolve it and be honest about it with administrators, two significant departures, it seems, from my conversations with them.

And finally this weekend, I seem to have made a significant breakthrough. And one that completely illustrates the foolishness of trying to intimidate our way through important priorities, with adults as well as with kids.

The problem I've been having is that there is always far more things on my to do list than I can ever seem to get done at any particular time. And while I was trying to get my head wrapped around that and the priority and time management and organization that I have improved light years on this year, I was perpetually getting really intimidated by the list. This goes for personal stuff at home and in my own life - cleaning, finances, personal priorities and errands - as it does for professional priorities. It's swamped me and had me feeling terribly overwhelmed and without really understanding what the problem was, and learning very slowly how to come to terms with real time and resource and energy limits and do the work one thing at a time.

And yet I was still feeling overwhelmed, which was blocking me from feeling a sense of real control or real satisfaction or seeing a clear and substantial light at the end of the tunnel (I've had faith, the entire time, that as I learned as much as I was learning about managing my priorities and my life - and I have been learned tons, in the last year especially - that I would get it figured out. But now I know what it's going to take to get me there much more).

The big breakthrough was not just learning to write everything down, to write appointments and as much down in my carefully looked after planner as possible, to keep my papers and office and life organized, to take time to do this all a little at a time rather than all in one fell swoop when a deadline creeped up on me, and to stop burning myself out and making myself a grumpy teacher by burning all my candles at both ends. These were all lessons and more that I learned this year as matters of habit and not just matters of abstraction.

The big breakthrough was to stop feeling intimidated by the big list and to do each priority one thing at a time. Now, I need to clarify. The big breakthrough was not to just do one priority at a time, which was a big lesson I learned earlier this year.

The big breakthrough was learning not to feel intimidated by all of the priorities I had to get accomplished, in my personal life as well as in my professional life. Focussing on doing one priority at a time helped me break down each thing on the list into much more manageable chunks that helped me see how everything could get done and that I could even play a manageable catch-up on some stuff I've fallen behind on, given a commitment to getting each thing done in more manageable, realistic chunks.

But the big breakthrough, ironically, for all of the intimidation that at least one former advisor and every administrator I've ever worked with (this job is my first professional job; every other job I've had have been jobs where you do the work you're told, like in junior high or middle school or high school, but which you are not ultimately responsible for completed projects) was learning to not be intimdated by the big list, to keep track of and organize and schedule all of my priorities meticulously (something that I think I've gotten very good at and that I think, within a year, I should be a serious pro at, meaning at the level of some of the more organized managers and neatfreaks and anal-retentive professionals who have always intimidated me a little, with their abilities as much as with their personalities, but who do keep their stuff organized, something that has always been impressive to me even as I have scoffed at it out of a lack of understanding of just how important keeping my life and my priorities organized and managing them well).

And as I think about my experience with this and about a conversation I had with a girl on Saturday in a class I'm taking about her feelings of being intimidated by school and academic learning, I completely understand why a lot of kids blow off school, now.

Like me, if this girl is right, which I think she is, many of them feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the work. And without a life raft to pull them out of that ocean of feeling overwhelmed - which can only come with the lesson learned, not just with teacher direction - they begin to intuitively learn to not be intimidated by the work and by the teachers, just as I've been doing. Often trying to learn to not be intimidated looks like blowing off the work. And sometimes it does involve blowing off the work. But, ultimately, the lesson involved is learning how to do the work out of a sense of self-discipline and self-direction without, in my case, feeling intimidated by all of the million things to get done and the million ways you can think to improve them. But the bottom-line, for me, at least, was that I cannot not concentrate and get the work done when I'm feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by it. Or, at least, I cannot concentrate nearly as well or as for long as if was not feeling so frustrated with it, perpetually.

That's why it's ironic that you have people trying to intimidate you or reintimidate you. Because the whole point when people do this is to not feel intimidated.

I remember in grad school have a distinct time in my studies and my life when I decided that I was tired of being scared. Of professors, of my workload, of politics and the law (which seemed a really nasty place to operate, and is far nastier today than it was when I was in school), of work life and the job market, of financial issues, of all of it. I was tired of being afraid of all of the high stakes issues in my life, after struggling with pressures of both those priorities and resolving important policy matters in my own mind and the consequences all of this had for mine and Brandi's relationship and then losing that relationship, which was more important to me than all of these things.

And today, I think I'm finally getting past all of the fear, as much a possible. And, ironically, it was all the fear and the intimidation and the feeling intimidated that was blocking up the learning that needed to take place to get to resolution on a lot of these issues.

I never fail to be amazed how often this happens. How often the fear blocks up the learning, which is what was needed in the first place. And yet how often a huge barrier to solving so many problems is the fear and intimidation and pressure imposed on people, like me, presumably to get to a resolution. And yet no matter how long the pressure tends to undermine rather than facilitate resolution, how long its proponents will maintain their advocacy of it.

The Middle East peace process is the best example of this counterproductivity that I can think of. Militants use terrorism to pressure for favorable conditions for an Israeli withdrawal. All Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah and all of the many independent Palestinians in the region, presumably want a safer, freer (of Israeli occupation, at least), more culturally and economically strong and vibrant, more respected, more self-respecting and contributing Palestine. All of which need space for engagement, discussion, debate, and learning. And yet it is all of the violence and terrorism and political pressure imposed by pressure tactics like terrorism that keeps Palestine in such shambles and at war with Israel.

It's a tragic situation, where the people most responsible for the problem refuse to take responsibility for fear of looking weak and for fear of losing their leveraging power, and for fear of being prosecuted for the murder of all of the people they have killed in the name of their cause.

In the West, we have a similar but less pronounced problem where the people most responsible for the pressure and arm-twisting that is persistently undermining resolution to so many important issues, including important security issues, liberals and conservatives among them and most people, not just a few, who rally and cheerlead such efforts, very much like in Palestine, foolishly believing that such tragedy and counterproductivity have somehow accomplished more than they clearly have not, all on the premise that enough muscle will solve a problem without ever considering if that premise is true or not, especially given the plethora of evidence that it is not true, but with a broad number of people of all kinds of authority all over the world still acting as it is more true than it is, they continue to advocate the muscle.

The only way out of it is to see the failures more honestly. And to do that means to end the denial and talk about the failures more honestly, which the pressure and the intimidation often blocks up and undermines, as well.

And in my life, and I am finally getting one area of my life where I have felt intimidated organized and under control despite and often being undermined by the efforts to intimidate me into shape, rather than facilitated by them.

And the best thing I can do for the cause of ending this sad, failed, foolish myth of muscle over mind or muscle independent of well developed thought about its use is to call it out for its failures as often as possible until the message becomes clear that it does not work.

Melissa and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, this weekend, while I cleaned the apartment on Saturday, and it is amazing to me two themes of that story: how far we have come since our most primitive, unevolved days of as predators and aggressive primates, and how little we have learned in that same time, about the failure of aggression to solve so many of our problems. The reason why reducing aggression is such an important goal for pscyhological health and individual and cultural progress is because it so rarely solves problems we want it to solve, so often creates them and worsens them, and how often we fail to recognize that fact because we are too busy using the same strategy, uncritically, no matter how often it fails and no matter how much it bullies and intimidates people, in the meantime, undermining bonds of trust and love and mutual respect and responsibility and learning which are the building blocks for accomplishing more of our goals.

Realistically, there are still important places where aggression and force must be used, to deal with the clear and physically dangerous aggression of others, in particular, but we are going through a very serious period of cultural and political regression around this issue, right now, rationalizing its persistent and overwhelmingly counterproductive overuse and abuse, and not taking responsibility or account for how much it has failed to achieve our goals.

There are limits to power, as my first book will argue, and as an article I read this weekend about the frustrations of Democrats in Congress to achieve their priorities rightly argued, no matter how much we might fantasize otherwise.

The good thing is that in a more liberal democratic society, there is more open, honest reflection, discussion, debate, and room for acknowledgement for such an idea. And all of the failure, right now, is an opportunity for us to learn the lesson.

In my own life, lessons that I've been working at learning for quite a long time, now, are getting learned despite all of the fear and intimidation I've both felt that I've had people try to use to foolishly motivate me to learn and to get priorities accomplished. And, ironically, it is so much of the fear and intimidation that creates so many of the problems we seek to resolve, rather than solving them. And this is one of them.

Now I've got work to do:).

Love,
Ben

Why kids are reasonably skeptical of their parents (and why parents are reasonably skeptical of their children)

After a second viewing of Brokeback Mountain, one of the at least 5 movies in 2005 that should have outlasted the cynical racial politics of Crash for nomination, nevertheless winning, Best Picture, it all of a sudden occurred to me why kids are quite reasonably skeptical of their parents.

It's the bitterness. It's the cynicism and the pain and the bitterness that accumulates on their hearts over time (that is the answer to Abraham Maslow's question of what happened to those cute, bubbly kids who grow up to be worn down adults). Kids sense it, intuitively, even if they don't always know what it is. Adults carry it with them around pain they've never resolved in their heart when they don't practice forgiveness and letting go, which leaves them sad, angry, bitter adults. A fairly tragic way to live life, really, if you ask me.

Kids have dreams, quite reasonably. And their parents' and teachers' and other adults' bitterness and cynicism often cuts against those dreams. So they grow skeptical of those same adults, quite reasonably. Cynical too, perhaps, absorbing the pain of having adults rationalize their pain and cynicism and hurtful ways onto their children. Hopefully adults and kids work through this, over time. But, in the meantime, kids are skeptical of anyone who might talk down them or their dreams or rationalize cynical realities. And a lot of kids, sadly, probably grow cynical about the world like their parents, just cynical about their parents as much as anyone else. It's a tragic little cycle, sadly.

Parents and teachers and adults are, quite reasonably, skeptical of their children, as well. They are skeptical that they know what they are doing without adult guidance (which they generally don't, even as they are almost always completely convinced that they have never met adult guidance they can trust). Kids can be a little arrogant, in my experience, with a little knowledge being dangerous. But better adults patiently love them and guide them, nonetheless, into adulthood, the best they know how, always, no matter who they are how much better or worse they deal with their children.

Everyone thinks they know what others around them don't know and is, therefore, reason for why they should be running the show, since the folks around them are so clueless. And the same goes for kids, often, as much for adults, I think. I know I felt that way much of my life, until I realized that no matter what role you play, you still have win peoples' trust and learn how to work with them, no matter how high or low you are in the food chain. Otherwise, they just won't work with you. Not for real.

It is too bad that so many people live such sad, bitter lives. That they carry around their pain on their heart like a trophy from the past that they just don't want to let go of. But it is a fact of life that leads many people to rationalize the ugliest and most cynical realities, and which leads their children to become skeptical that they have any clue how to be happy in the world and wonder what in the world they think they are thinking that they would follow their lead or example when they are so clearly unhappy, if they would take a second to be honest with themselves.

Kids want to be happy. And they don't want to be unhappy like their parents. And so, they are, quite reasonably, skeptical of any advice from someone who would want to lead them into a life of similar unhappiness.

It's the healthiest of instincts for kids to have. No matter how cynical adults may be about their children, as they are about everyone else in the world, now that they've lived a little bit and been hurt by the big, bad world and carry their pain around like a blanket (more like a shell, typically) that they think will somehow protect them from getting hurt again.

It's a sad reality. But it is also a hopeful one that kids can, intuitively, often see through that pain and that heartache and that cynicism to see that there is something more hopeful for them and their future.

And good for them.

Love,
Ben

Being decent

Nine years ago, liberals like myself were aghast and outraged as Republican prosecutors charged President Bill Clinton with perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky investigation by Kenneth Star. "There was no crime that took place," we argued. "There should have been no investigation in the first place."

"No," conservatives argued. "It doesn't matter if there was a crime involved. What matters is that the President lied under oath, crime or not."

Nine years later, those same liberals all argue that Lewis Libby should go down for the same crime, and conservatives argue for a pardon.

All's fair in love and war, you think? Not really, I don't think. Just the same old bullshit.

What we need to learn to do, all of us, is to do the decent thing. And stop playing games with politics and prosecutions and one another with some self-righteous sense that any of us have all the answers. We don't. It doesn't matter what party or what ideology or what law we operate under.

None of us have all the answers.

Which is exactly why we need to be more decent to one another, not tougher and more mean-spirited.

None of us embody that elusive perfection that we so wish that we embodied, but cannot possibly be, no matter how tough we are with one another.

We've all been kind of pricks to one another, is the truth. Not just for the last 6 years. But since the dawn of humanity. And the only way forward is to leave that tragic legacy behind.

The only way forward is to be more decent.

Everything else is us deceiving ourselves and one another. The consequence of a long legacy of forcing and repressing ourselves and one another to pretend to be better than we really are.

But if we can learn to embrace our inner pricks, and be more decent with ourselves and one another, we can move forward.

And that is the only true path of progress.

Love,
Ben

My ideal life

It's funny. My dreams for myself have both changed and stayed the same in so many ways from when I was 18.

When I was 18 and just beginning school at my alma mater, Wichita State University, I had two major goals.

To be a good dad. And to gain wisdom.

Not to terribly shabby goals for an 18-year-old, I don't think, looking back. Some pretty fine goals, actually, I think. I'm proud of that kid.

Today, my ideal life would look like this.

I'd like to teach with young people of all ages - middle school, high school, university level, and even elementary school, if I could get the opportunity though I lack the credentials, currently - and write somewhere with plenty of freedom to do both without all the pressures and limitations of departmental and school politics and with as little intrusion by other pressures, from the state and elsewhere, as possible. I'm all about openness and engaging others, inside and outside the places I work. But I want it to be as respectful and decent and intellectually honest as possible. Meaning, we can disagree as much as we agree, and noone gets their arm twisted over it.

I'd like to teach and write where I have maximum freedom to just do the best job I know how. Noone does everything well all the time. I just want to do my best job, make my best judgments, and to deal as little as possible with the pressures bearing to compromise those essential responsibilities of teaching and writing as little as possible.

I'd like to make enough money to be comfortable. And I wouldn't mind people reading my books and maybe speaking with people about my ideas, sometimes.

I'd like to fall in love with someone who makes my heart flutter and makes me want to collapse when she is gone (one day both of us will be gone for one another, no matter how well our lives together turn out). I want to raise children with her and get old with her and still feel passionately in love and feel total respect and admiration for her while we raise our children, even as I learn and know about all her flaws and mistakes and more humble qualities. I'd like to have a little house and pay for it, maybe a house my family built if I end up settling in the Wichita area, and stick with it for awhile, maybe. I'd like to be my ideal image of John Dreifort - a history professor at Wichita State that I never had but who raised a fine son in Darren Dreifort, the young pitcher for the Wichita State Shockers then L.A. Dodgers - raising a good kid, doing good work, and living a good life, humbly and as well as I can doing good with the life that I have.

I'd like to live a good life and be proud of it.

That's my ideal life. Falling in love is key to that life, since being in love, for real, is the most beautiful feeling I've ever experienced in my life and the one I'd most like to repeat.

That'd be a nice life. I could love a life like that.

Love,
Ben

The folly of infallible judgment

Charles Krauthammer writes a piece, today, that both argues well the merits of Lewis Libby's case and illustrates the arrogance of partisan efforts to take people down.

Fitzgerald's Folly

What's interesting about Charles' piece is that he simultaneously takes apart the generally politically-motivated case for putting Lewis Libby in prison and defends the poor case for prosecuting Bill Clinton and the vitriol of conservatives in going after Sandy Berger.

The bottom line is that this prosecution, like so many prosecutions of public figures, was largely political. It isn't political in a conventional sense. Patrick Fitzgerald is a Republican going after a Republican Chief of Staff for a Republican Vice President. What is political about this trial and this prosecution is that it is meant to validate a growing sense among many established journalists, politicians and advisors and legal and political folks that the Bush Administration took them on a wild goose chase in Iraq and that the Valerie Plame affair was yet another dirty-handed way of washing their hands of that fated decision. All kinds of folks both blaming the Administration for a decision to that was largely popular at the time, especially in those established circles - I thought it was a rash move and said so at a time when very few people did so publicly, certainly not very many among either Republican or Democratic political establishments - and are trying to validate their sense that something tough must be done to hold them accountable both for that decision and allegations that they outed Plame out of revenge and dirty tricks. The essence of the growing and tough-minded consensus among many political observers is that the Administration lied about the war in Iraq, that they smeared a CIA agent who dared challenge their lies, and that what is needed is for someone's head to roll.

The first claim is partly true. The Administration did, likely, exaggerate claims about weapons of mass destruction to advocate this war. We do know that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, because he had used them before on the Kurds. But we had no clue about a nuclear program, is the truth, and the evidence for that claim was trumped up to bolster an already present desire to invade Iraq, take advantage of anger after 9/11, and "take the fight to the terrorists."

The second claim - that the Administration was trying to get revenge on Joseph Wilson - I'm not as convinced about. I'm convinced that the Administration was pretty slimy in demoting Richard Clarke as he warned the Administration that the war might inspire a new generation of terrorists and might likely be counterproductive. But I'm not convinced that the Administration was engaging in revenge against Valerie Plame. I used to think, out of cynicism, largely, but with very little evidence, that this was likely true, when this story first broke and it was Karl Rove and not Lewis Libby who was the focus of peoples' hostility. But, in retrospect, what I was largely feeling was anger both about the decision to go to war and about the denials by the Administration that things were going better than they were, when it was clear to more objective and forward-looking observers that things were not going so well, which is exactly what many important counterterrorism and international policy observers warned the President would likely happen (though, in the President's defense, important international policy scholars, like Joe Nye, signed onto this war when he first announced its possibility, only to rethink the war in retrospect). I didn't really have much evidence that the Administration was engaged in dirty tricks, but I had all kinds of suspicions with the Richard Clarke saga finding its way to front pages.

So, I have serious doubts and reservations about the second claim and have seen very little evidence, as of yet, that it is true, especially given that it looks like Valerie Plame was not, in fact, covert, something that is reinforced by the instructions by the judge to ignore the original criminal allegations in question. And the second claim means a lot to me since catching someone in a technicality when there may not be a serious wrong in the first place is itself generally dirty pool, in my estimation, very comparable to the dirty pool engaged in by Bill Clinton's impeachment prosecutors almost a decade ago.

The third claim is really the one that troubles me the most: that heads need to roll. It not only troubles me because I'm not clear that there was a underlying crime or any serious underlying wrongdoing in this situation, nor just because lying to a prosecutor when you are afraid that you might be prosecuted, even if there is no crime, is both a human and clearly, from the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton, a fairly common, human mistake made by every very good people - meaning, I think, to some degree, unless there is some other more serious issue involved, this is a far too unrealistic and perfectionistic standard to hold average and even very good people to that is done when we don't give a shit about what is realistic or decent to others and just abstract and self-righteous notions of good that are both meant to validate our own sense of self-righteous perfectionism and to validate why our dickishness is really because what good people we are trying to uphold standards of decency and law in a society that would crumble if we weren't such pricks.

Meaning, the underlying political nature of this case is a lot of pricks in established political circles all patting themselves on the back on how their prickishness really makes the world a better place, even as it has experienced such dramatic failures in Iraq, with Iran, and elsewhere.
And I just have no patience or tolerance for that bullshit and all of the self-deception and self-validation for being a self-congratulating asshole that is involved with that kind of rationalization.

This case is about people trying to make heads roll for this war and this Administration. Even if Lewis Libby was not responsible for going to war. And even if many of the very people involved in the head-rolling are much more responsible for the the push to go to war since they much more publicly advocated that move than did Lewis Libby. And it is also about validating that what this country has really needed, not just on Iraq but for everything, is for assholes like them to really make heads roll. They're just trying to keep the world safe. They're not self-righteous, self-congratulating bullies who simultaneously want forgiveness for their own advocacy for the war and who want heads to roll for the President's advocacy of that war and for his and Vice President Cheney's and Lewis Libby's presumed efforts to get revenge on their detractors. The current political era is a function of people who know what is right and wrong and are insistent that bad actors get their due, not self-righteous bullies validating their desire and persistent insistence on getting and forcing their way on whatever issue tickles their fancy. They are defenders of the law. And how dare anyone suggest otherwise.

This prosecution was political. Not just because Democrats and liberals were the chorus of folks in the press and in the blogosphere and in the discussion to take someone, anyone, down for this and the whole mess in Iraq. It was political because it validated everyone's sense that it was the Bush Administration's version of bullying that was problematic, not the bullying, itself.

Ties in those cases and in all cases of prosecution, I believe and presumption of innocence seems to imply, should go to the runner. Meaning, we should presume that people should be free, if we're not sure. And if the case involves flawed humanity that doesn't immediately hurt anyone directly or intentionally, I believe.

I just think it's worthless to go after people for the sake of going after people. And as a teacher who sees kids act poorly every single day of my life and having some experience with the criminal justice system, I'm completely convinced that the only thing that makes a difference in peoples' behavior, for real, is conscience. And in the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger (who I did not want to see prosecuted, either, even though I think he, too, looks like he was likely guilty of a relatively minor crime), you had three people who were committing crimes to avoid punishment elsewhere. In the courtroom, for Libby, in the court of public opinion and in the case for disbarment for Bill Clinton, and at the ballot box and public opinion polls, for Berger protecting President Clinton.

The truth is that this period - the Iraq war, the Libby trial, and the deeply hateful and polarizing partisanship and tough action that has characterized every political discussion of this period- has completely sapped my trust of partisans or established political folks persisently defending their own behavior and advocacy and persistently looking to take down their opponents and any arguments meant to advance a larger cause without genuine responsibility to a humbler and wiser view of human nature and reality which seeks to constructively lift up humanity and resolve serious conflicts rather than out of a hunger for power or some arrogant notion that any person, any group, any ideology, any party, any leader, anyone knows best with any kind of finality or final authority or infallibility.

There is no such thing as infallible judgment. And one of lifes' most profound tragedies is that the very people who are most convinced of the infallibility of their judgment are those most ready and willing to impose it on others and sacrafice others to their cause. The 20th century was littered with so many of such leaders sacraficing millions to their cause. The 21st century, sadly, seems poised to repeat that mistake. History repeating itself, as Marx might say, first as tragedy, then as farce.

I don't trust such people to be leaders, is the truth. And noone should, in reality. Because you will always be the person you never suspected who will be sacraficed to their cause next. I've learned this from experience, having liberals sacrafice me and my well-being numerous times when my thinking did not conform to the party line, from my liberal advocacy days until now.

The truth is that the kind of partisanship that we are witnessing today is exactly why the leadership and example of so many political leaders, journalists, activists, and even scholars and ordinary folks who follow politics should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted as worthy enough to presume to know how to run or to determine the outcome of peoples' lives. That, as much as any other reason, is why liberal democracies do, more, and should, as much as possible, presume in favor of respecting peoples' freedom and ability to self-determine their lives, rather than presume that any of the ambitious, often arrogant, and generally power-hungry folks involved in the current political dramas of the day would know best how they should run their lives.

And yet we always seek out a religious or political or intellectual messiah who will finally save us from all this free will we experience in our lives and use and abuse, no matter how many ways we try to contain that very real and staying fact of life, no matter how many rules we put in place and no matter how strictly we enforce them. We use and abuse it to learn from it, largely. And in the bigger picture, we do learn from it, when we aren't making excuses for our failures, as is the mainstay of the current political era. As individuals and as a culture, we generally learn from our failures. That is how we've made the advances we have made today that have led us to more freedom, and stronger liberal democratic institutions and values. And learning to trust that direction for our forward movement is one of the most important lessons that we are learning, right now.

The truth is that there is no leader, no prosecutor, no journalist, no scholar, no activist, no real or mythical mother or father, no religious messiah who has the infallible judgment and advice and wisdom that we seek. Which is why we must learn to determine our lives better ourselves rather than always look to some central governing body to organize it for us.

And all of our efforts to have some leader, some governing body, some group, some idea, someone or thing to finally govern all of us and standardize all of our behavior have always resulted in what we are witnessing today: hubris. The arrogance of power and the notion that it can once and for all resolve our most pressing problems and needs.

There is no such thing as infallible judgment, anywhere. And its absence is all the more reason to presume that people should have their lives governed best by their own self-direction and self-determination and freedom and as least as possible from distant powerful persons or forces.

And the fact that Scooter Libby's conviction is still being debated, as well as the 2000 election, and ideological purity and superiority, should be the clearest evidence that no power, no authority, no ideological orientation will ever resolve any question with finality, ever. Which should humble our faith in any of those means of trying to resolve such questions and turn to the one place where issues do find some humbler and more authentic resolution: in our own consciences and engagement and learning and intelligent reflection.

And the saddest fact of this period is how, at every turn when people involved should have been and should be turning to honest, engaged, open-minded and open-hearted, and thoughtful reflection, discussion, learning, and disagreement, with an eye to choices and resolutions of least hubris and claims on final rendering, we have persisently, instead, turned to maximum power and force and ideological bitterness and self-righteousness as the poorest substitute possible.

In the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger, and, at this point, virtually every important political matter, the various partisans have seen these dramas through the lenses of their ideological animus and their self-righteous claims on final understanding and loyalty to their friends and animosity towards their opponents.

And none of it serves anyone in any deepest sense.

Something tells me that this is not the best that we can do. This is not our highest humanity. And I think I understand much better, today, why the most liberally democratic minded writers that I read in high school and college and graduate school always referred to such nebulous concepts as our "highest humanity." Because the truth is that we can wallow in our basest and lowest impulses as long as we like. We can cloak them in the law, in power, in authority, and in virtually any institution we desire. The Nazi regime did this very thing in almost every institution in German society, as did Communists in Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea and around the world. The law and political authority above all else, for everyone who is romanticizing the law as some final value of a liberal society during these times, is the hiding place for our cowardice and basest impulses.

As sad as it is, ultimately, for humanity, if we choose destructive and self-destructive and dysfunctional means of dealing with one another and our shared and independent problems, there really is nothing to stop us, since the law and political authority are generally rationalized as a part of those destructive and self-destructive choices. Genocide, sectarianism, repression, apartheid, slavery, and other vices of power are regularly rationalized in the name of law and political authority.

Our highest humanity is available to us when we choose to leave behind such legacies, tragically long after they have done their worst.

This period is not our highest humanity. That can only be a plain fact for anyone with any sense of hope, at all, for our future beyond humanity's periodic tumbles. We would have to be blind to look at how we are conducting ourselves today and say this is what our highest values have to offer us. Or hopeless.

Naziism and Communism were and are outgrowths of that kind of hopeless cynicism, I can see more clearly today as I watch it parade as the best that liberal democracy has to offer.

Our most important question at the beginning of the 21st century is are we going to let that tragic legacy persist for another generation and another century? Or are we going to more fully embrace our highest and strongest liberal democratic values?

Hubris persisently haunts humanity's history and present. And yet we limp and march forward. Sometimes too confidently. At times too timidly. Perhaps one day in a way that fully embraces everything that is best and worst in us, and chooses, over time, as individuals and as societies, to do better, despite our worst and out of a commitment to what can be best in all of us, given a genuine commitment from our free will to do so.

Perhaps by learning to embrace our worst instincts, we can learn, better to distinguish them from our best and to choose better as we learn to more honestly face ourselves and give each other greater space to face one another without fear of attack or retribution or other sources of fear that undermine our mutual trust and bonding and more genuine mutual responsibility.

For now, we use our fallible judgments and falllible institutions to yield the most good possible while we build better ones.

And the most important institution that we build in liberal democratic societies is the institution of the individual. Educated and self-governing, independent with an eye to genuine interdependence, which can only truly transpire with respect for her or his independence, confident and with eyes wide open in a world of uncertainty and far too much fear for us to continue to contribute more of it and have it continue to be so counterproductive to our aspirations, for ourselves and for one another.

Absent these kinds of aspirations, we can always count on our more power-hungry, hateful and less thoughtful, ideologically-tinged and motivated activities and institutions even in liberal democratic societies to be perpetually sprinkled with illegitimacy, lacking real public trust and credibility. They will sadly deserve that tinge, as it is and will be clear and apparent to everyone that they fail to live up to those highest aspirations, so lost are they and we living down to our basest impulses as it concerns power and one another.

We can avoid that. But it will mean being bigger. When much of the world is rationalizing being smaller.

Either way, we will live with the institutions, the governments, and the worlds that we choose.

May we choose wisely.

Love,
Ben

David Boies and Scooter Libby

Robert Novak is dead-on in his Washington Post article (which is rare for Robert, in my view, since he is, generally, such a mean-spirited, snarly son-of-a-bitch).

A Verdict on the Wilson Affair

If David Boies, the lawyer for Vice President Gore in Gore vs. Bush, is arguing that Libby shouldn't have been prosecuted because there was no underlying crime, for which I have seen zero evidence that there was and which the Judge specifically ruled inadmissable because, in all likelihood, there was no underlying crime - Valerie Plame was not likely covert, and certainly not within the 5 year timeline needed to make this the alleged crime - then liberals, Democrats, conservatives, and Republicans should be taking a second look at this case. Boises arguments are strong ones for an appeal in this case, and if they lose on appeal, President Bush should pardon Scooter Libby on the merits of the case, assuming that this is the case.

The truth is exactly what Robert Novak argues in this article. This was a political prosecution that was not sound on its own merits. If Valerie Plame was covert and Scooter Libby knew that fact and he and anyone or a conspiracy of folks in the Administration set out to expose her for political purposes, I have much less sympathy for Scooter Libby, even as I doubt this prosecution would do much good.

But the much more serious situation, here, is that it is very likely that David Boies is right. That there was no underlying crime here. And that liberals and the press have gotten wrapped up in their animus for the Administration and convicted a man for a crime for which there was no underlying crime. There is a very strong case to be made that this was a misunderstanding of an argument about the relationship between Joseph Wilson and his trip to Niger and the Administration and not an effort to out a covert CIA agent who, at this point, it does not appear was covert, and for which this case should likely be dismissed, unless evidence is produced to demonstrate otherwise. And even then, I, personally, would be open to a pardon, unless I hear a clear case for why his prosecution would do some actual good, for which I have not heard, for all of the cheerleading coverage I've heard on the conviction in this case.

The truth is that our bloodlust and eagerness to get tough and force our way through difficult issues has likely gotten the best of us in this situation. And a potentially and very likely innocent man's freedom may be hanging in the balance while we try to see past all of our animosities.

Lewis Libby still has my presumption of innocence in this case. Not because I don't think that he lied. I do think that he lied. I just think he lied about nothing out of his fear of being prosecuted, not necessarily because he had done anything illegal. The ever-feeding cycle of cynicism in this case and in Washington should not be a reason to put a man in jail. To the contrary, we should face up to the consequences of our zealous efforts to muscle our way through difficult issues if we ever want to get Washington on the better track.

Love,
Ben

The advantage of feeling like a nobody

I've had one of the shittiest months of my life. I don't know if I can quite remember a time in my life when I was told so many things that were wrong with me. Maybe when I was a kid, when my parents were constantly fed up with me. That would explain why I felt so bad at that time.

This week I've felt like a nobody. I haven't felt like that much in my life, because my life has been so full of accomplishment, at this point.

But some people are convinced that I am wrong about something they disagree with me about and all they see in me is confirmation of their thinking that I am off my nut. And I've never been told so often just how shitty people think I am. I deal with it all the time from the kids. But hearing it from adults has me feeling like a nobody this week.

And the advantage of feeling like a nobody I realize, today, is that it reminds me how much everyone needs to feel appreciated. No matter how much or little they have to contribute to the world. Everyone needs appreciation and support. But we spend a lot of time degrading and mocking people who are nicer or more supportive. I've always been a nice guy, so I've never really known much differently. But as I get older, I realize how much people see nice as weakness rather than strength, even as they view mean with suspicion and fear.

We're all so afraid, noone can get it straight, is the truth. And 9/11 teaches us that sometimes stronger people have to take a hit before the contrast is stark enough for people to see what real weakness looks like. Real weakness is killing or oppressing innocent people for power or for a cause. Real strength is being able to take the hit, even when it never seems to want to let up.

Today is a day after a month of taking the hits that never seem to want to let up.

I volunteered to take a job that most people would not want: to take the kids struggling the most and with the worst attitudes and behavior, generally, and to be committed to their success despite all the odds. And all I've gotten is shit that I have not walked on water or worked miracles to force them to be national merit scholars and doing all of my paperwork with precise exactitude after a year on the job.

Now I see why noone wants to do this work. Why so many people drop out of it and move on to greener pastures. Because it involves people from all over the place trying to leverage for results that can only be earned and cannot be forced, even if I wanted to. People become smart because they choose to take smart seriously. That cannot be forced, no matter how much we might like to try.

And today I feel like nobody. Because nobody is ever satisfied with a damn thing I do. No matter how hard I try.

And that's how many people and kids feel without someone like me telling them what a good job they're doing, all the time, even if they aren't national merit scholars.

Now I just need to hear that, every once in awhile.

Love,
Ben

The consequence of getting tough

I had a meeting for a student, today, which completely epitomizes the consequence of getting tough.

I had a student, today, who got in a fight. She also happened to be in special education. Which is a mess.

Instead of just owning up and saying that she was sorry and that maybe she just shouldn't fight again in the future (a topic around which there is, actually, quite a bit of real complexity for both kids and adults, no matter how much we try to oversimplify it with rules and laws against fighting), this kid's mom and social worker sat and made a hour's worth of excuses. She was bi-polar, she was overloaded with work, she was stressed, yada, yada, yada. There may be truth to the idea that stress makes us more prone to aggression, but I watched this girl wail on another girl in the middle of the cafeteria, provoked only by her talking and her "mean mugging," as the kids would say.

And I sat there the entire time thinking, "What good is this doing for this kid? What mom would do this? Find all kinds of excuses for a kids' behavior instead of just expecting them to say they were sorry and that they'll try not to do it again?"

But you know why people do this?

To get out of the punishment. There's no other reason, really. They may really believe it, at some level. But it is clearly to provide a rationale to keep from being punished. As surely as people rationalize popular governing philosophies to get rewarded and grab for power. They may actually believe it, too. Stalin really believed Communism. Hitler really believed Naziism. And they both rationalized the shit out of life to get what they were looking for.

Everyone does it. Kids. Adults, Politicians. Citizens. Mothers. Fathers. Employers. Employees. Teachers. Students. Scholars. Dumbasses. Everyone. We all do it. We all do it to get out of the punishment. Which is exactly what allowed the Nazis to maintain power in Germany. Because everyone was too fuckin' terrified to do otherwise. A page which contemporary liberals and conservatives have apparently taken from the playbook of Joseph Goebbels.

And we are stuck with it now and forever until people get the courage to stop doing it.

The truth is that the Commuists and the Nazis were not quite so different from us. They were just more extreme in their commitment to getting tough and forcing "progress," a mantle they both embraced as wholeheartedly as Democrats and Republicans embrace that mantle today.

The great tragedy of the 20th century was that Germans embraced that mantle of forced "progress" for more than a decade in the 30's and 40's. The Russian people, much more sadly, embraced it for more than 70 years. The Chinese and North Koreans have embraced it, now, for almost 60 years. Syria for more than 40.

And the democracies of the West whose example and criticism and engagement and fruits of freedom were so critical to the fall of the Nazis and the Communists in the 20th century and are so needed to free the peoples of China, North Korea and Syria, have, at the beginning of the 21st century, embraced the very philosophy that brought the dictators in each of those governments to power.

And the biggest lie of all was not Hitler's. It was the lie that it was all that force rather than our free will and conscience that led to more responsible lives, when it is so clearly the threat of force that leads students' like my kid, today, and those in power and everyone to avoid taking responsibility, if we could ever just be honest about that fact. With others and, much more importantly, with ourselves.

And that is the true consequence of getting tough. And it always has been. This one long lie that we've told ourselves and one another that we were and are better than we really were and are, all because of how much more people were forced to be better. The bigger lie we tell is how we are. That we are better than we are, not just that we were better in the past. All because of how others forced us to be as good as we are today. That all the force in Washington is clearly making Washington a better place, and all of America and the world a better place as a consequence. Which is why we need that power, today. To make others as good as us.

That is the biggest lie. Joseph Goebbels would be proud. For all of it. How tough we get. And all the lies we tell in its name. To others. And to ourselves.

Love,
Ben

Pussy-footing our way to progress

I still have to write about brown paper wrapper for internet porn, Carson's blog tag from last week. It offers a very nice challenge for how we might handle difficult situations like kids' access to pornography in a world where we take freedom seriously, which I think we should.

But, for now, I want to assume that I'm wrong. And talk about why we are such pussies that we can't take real progress seriously if we want really believe in the idea of forcing the world to do good.

I think it's because we're soft. We just don't the balls that Stalin or the Jihadists have to impose our will on people. Liberal democracy has softened us and folks like Hitler could see that which is why he could so easily stomp about Europe with so little opposition. Because the truth is that freedom is for pussies.

So, I'm thinking: Let's get serious about progress, for God's sakes.

Here's what I'm thinking.

First, freedom of thought is for pussies. We all know what is right and what as wrong. The Good Book, for some, and Marx, for others, is self-evident. So why in the fuck we would take independent judgment and conscience seriously other than to arrive at what we already know is right is just fuckin' beyond me. Right is right. Or, if you're a Democrat, left is right. And there's not much need to debate that or discuss it or to subject it to critical examination. What we need is someone to fuckin' let the world know that we mean fuckin' business. And if you want to critically examine our fuckin' ideas, then you can fuckin' eat shit and do what you're fuckin' told until we tell you it is your fuckin' turn to speak up you insubordinate little heretic. Freedom of thought is for people who don't know what the fuck we're doing. You saying we don't know what the fuck we're doing? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Second, we all know that peckers are the root of most known evil, and we'd cut the little fuckers off if we didn't need those sorry little things to reproduce the species. So what we need is some fuckin' control over peoples' propensity to do damage with their sex organs. Sexual freedom is for hippies and God knows those little Rastafarians stink up a room, with their astrology as much as with their propensity to skip showers. So it seems to me that with the clear consensus that force is the wave of the future, that we start to really initiate progress and fuckin' shut that shit down. I don't know why we think tolerating adultery, homosexuality, pornography, casual sex, sodomy (anal and oral, if you've consulted your Good Book, lately), and definitely abortion - which is murder of a baby, you fuckin' sociopath - is somehow a sign of civilization or a progressive society. The wave of the future is force, if you haven't fuckin' picked up a paper or listened to NPR, lately. So why you would have some antiquated notion that sexual or reproductive freedom is a sign of a progressive civilization is clearly the product of propaganda by pedophiles and pornographers, you fuckin' letch. Get with the program. And if you don't, don't worry. We'll make you.

Free trade and a free economy are the work of greed-riddled industrialists and neoconservatives, the same bunch that brought you the Iraq War. Think they were in denial about that little police action? Just wait till they start talking about a robust economy and globablization and the benefits to consumers from a self-correcting market. You think people can make their own choices and judgments without government oversight? Have you looked at how the market makes decisions? Can you really say that people in the market make better decisions than President Bush or Vice President Cheney or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi? Get real. Those market fuckers can talk themselves around a hoola-hoop, can't they? What the fuck has free trade done for us, other than ship our jobs off to some fuckin' chink or Indian or A-rab? Unregulated free trade is the bad husband that your mother told you would ruin your life, but did you listen to her?

No-oooooooh.

You know the place where we just haven't gotten tough enough? On people. All of them. They're a fuckin' mess. And what they need is some fuckin' medicine that they aren't going to fuckin' like, but they're gonna fuckin' get it anyway. It's called a good old-fashioned fuckin' whoop-ass. So here's what I'm thinking. If you do something wrong, anything. Whatever it is. I mean, we've pretty much narrowed it down, haven't we? The way to get people to do what they're supposed to do is to fuckin' make 'em, asshole. Stop making it so goddamn complicated. So what I'm thinking is, you fuckin' eat the meat, you fuckin' forget to recycle, you fuckin' smoke the reefer, you fuckin' forget get your taxes in late, you fuckin' don't fill out your OSHA paperwork.

First offense, you get a warning.

Second offense, you lose a knee-cap.

Third offense, public beheading.

Now, I know. A lot of bleeding heart conservatives out there are going to whine and moan, "Oh, what about the children? What about freedom? Now the terrorists win."

But I say, stop you're fuckin' whining you fuckin' right-wing pussies and learn to fuckin' take your licks like a fuckin' man. This is progress, baby. Get on the fuckin' truck or prepare to be run over, you fuckin' moron. Because noone asked if you wanted progress. You're going to fuckin' get it whether you fuckin' like it or not.

Oh, yeah. And drugs. There's a fuckin' war on, you fuckin' nimrod, if you haven't noticed. The war on drugs and the war on poverty are how we finally fuckin' rid ourselves of these and million other plagues on society. And if you can't fuckin' join up, you're either fuckin' with us or against. And in the meantime, we didn't fuckin' ask you. You're in the way. And if you didn't notice, we never said that progress was touchy-feely.

Next, politics. Someone's gotta clean that fuckin' mess up. And every damn person we send down there keeps getting covered with the mud. We gotta finally get serious about that godforesaken city. So what I'm thinking is that we once and for all finally require that politicians do what we tell them to do. I'm thinking a law with some real teeth. Oh, and no illegal namby pansy, either. I'm getting fuckin' tired of all the people we send to do the work of the law always ending up on the other side of it. So I'm proposing that we make any illegal activity illegal. Show them we're really serious. I'm thinking maybe a dungeon or some real time - life imprisonment clearly doesn't deter people from committing murder because they're still doing it, if you haven't noticed, so maybe something a little less Bob Ross-ish - or maybe dissappearing some people for awhile until they get the fuckin' message. Cause if you haven't seen the Pinochet regime, you haven't seen real force in the advance of progress.

I know, I know. All the wittle soft-headed conservatives and soft-hearted liberals are going to go their mommies and the ACLU and the Milton Friedman Foundation and say, "What are about ow fweedom? What about our wiberties?" And all I have to say is that noone fuckin' asked you, Mr. Rogers. What are you, some fuckin' rapist? You want the fuckin' pedophiles to win? Or the fundamentalists? Or Ken Lay and his buddies? Freedom is all fine and good as long as you don't have any fuckin' problems. But here on fuckin' earth we have our health and our safety and our children and our jobs at fuckin' stake, James Dean. Freedom's for chumps who don't know when to say stop. So our job is to say stop for them. What do you want? A world where everyone is going around breaking the rules and pretending like their following them? What a fuckin' mess that would be. How in the hell would we manage in a world where everyone went around pretending that they were following the rules and all the while clamoring for more of them? What a godawful mess that would be.

The problem with the world is that we don't want progress badly enough to impose it on people. What we fuckin' need is a fuckin' law once and for all that requires people to finally follow the law and put the fear of God in them. You want to smoke marijuana? Great. Pick a fuckin' jail cell, you fuckin' reactionary. You want to have an abortion? Goody for you. But you better be ready for a little brute force in your life. You want to fuckin' come into our country without our permission, say hola to el familio when you get to Mexico, Pablo.

Some people just don't know how to put the fear in people, because they don't understand just what a mess this world would be if it weren't for the wise men who make our laws and what a terrible, crazy dysfunctional little piece of insanity it would be for us to have a world where people are always breaking the rules and advocating for more?

You know what 21st century America and Nazi Germany have in common? It takes laws to keep order in this world. You want a bunch of Jews infecting our young people with their brand of anti-Christ? You want slaves going whereever they want to go, no matter how much people paid good money to have them till their soil? You want all those darkies in America or India and their "civil rights movements" and their "independence movements" just deciding which laws they were going to follow and which ones they were going to not follow? Laws are what keep that insanity from transpiring in our world. Laws kept out the Eastern Europeans and other undesireables, they are what kept us safe from the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, they are what kept that science teacher in Tennessee from teaching those poor children about monkeys being some kind of ancestor, they kept debtors from leaving prison and not paying what they owe, and they are what keep us safe, and healthy, and responsible.

Why have we not elected Patrick Fitzgeral President? Thank God Elliot Spitzer is well on his way. We need some prosecutorial zeal to make progress for this generation stick. Otherwise, how are people going to believe that when we say we're forcing progress, we mean business.

Without law, there is no morality. Law is how we define the bounds of good in our society. It's what keeps out the undesireables and keeps everyone else in their place. That's why we have to keep it safe.

From the consciences of its citizens.

Love,
Ben

Liberals got revenge for Cheney's revenge, and all I got was this lousy political era

The Scooter Libby trial has me completely fed up with Washington.

Why anyone would think that a city and a political era so completely wallowing in its own bitterness and cynicism and vengefulness and meanspiritedness should be an example to anyone, nevertheless the world, is completely beyond me.

And its not just the blowhards in office. It's the press. It's the activists. It's everyone in Washington so fuckin' cocksure of themselves and their self-righteous grandstanding. It's all kinds of people whose real feelings about the world and others don't at all warrant that their examples be followed but who demand and coerce it anyway, deserving or not.

I am completely fed up. I have no heroes in Washington or among any of the important political players, right now. It's one long swaggering, tough-minded groupthink wandering between ideological causes. This is not King or Ghandi. This is politics masqerading as something better.

This is the crowd of folks who propped up slavery, insistent that fugitive slave laws were the law of the land, and the underground railroad was full of cowardly scofflaws ignoring the highest court's Dred Scott ruling.

This the crowd of folks who made the Nazis' extermination of the Jews possible by complying with the laws, because it was the law, after all, to turn in Jews to be sent to the ghettos and murdered.

And this is a political era of cowardice and vengefulness and bitterness and cynicism masquerading as something better than they are.

There are many things I can't stomach in the world. But pretending like you and your motives are better than they really are because you're too cowardly to face yourself for real is not courage, and it certainly isn't an example to emulate.

The Scooter Libby trial is about revenge for revenge. And it leaves me with the feeling that either progress entails an uglier, more bitter, more mean-spirited future.

Or, more likely. That this isn't progress at all. This is something uglier. This is politics.

"What have you accomplished?" Americans should be asking Washington, right now.

The answer: a solemn "Nothing."

Love,
Ben

A rare moment of wholehearted agreement with the National Review

Pardon Libby

The bloodlust in Washington has gone on long enough. It's time to end it.

And if we can't, we deserve the government we get.

This is a Washington I want nothing to do with. It completely spoils my image of Washington as a place of idealism and inspiration of my younger days spent there.

At the end of the day, doesn't Washington have to look at itself, at some point, and asked, "What have we accomplished?"

As with the beginning of the Iraq war, denial is worst when it involves groupthink. When everyone pretends that everything is going well or ok. But what is going well or ok in Washington, these days? A Democratic majority? Is that what consistutes a healthy political system?

What has all this bloodlust accomplished?

Nothing. Tragically.

Love,
Ben

On being a self-righteous bastard

I've got one little post and then I've got a behavior plan, a paper, and an 11th day plan to do (and I still have to take up Carson's blog-tag at Content Done Better).

I just want to take a moment, after thinking about my last 33 years or so, to issue a general apology to the world.

My name is Ben Sutherland. And I am a self-righteous bastard.

When I think, today, about all of the problems that I've had with people who are goddamned sure that they have figured out the correct direction for the world and their clear need to pressure me to observe their wisdom, they all remind me of somebody: me.

When I was young and I would rail on my sisters that they weren't smart enough, on my father that he was an alcoholic (though the truth was that he hadn't drank more than he should in quite a long while since that rant), and on my mom for just trying to get me to vacuum the living room, I was a self-righteous and sometimes scary little bastard.

When I was in junior high school and I would argue with my uncles about their racism and get in their faces about what insensitive, racist assholes they were, I was a self-righteous bastard.

When I was in high school and I would rail about the backward thinking of conservatives and pride myself on being the most liberal member of our Kansas Boys' State delegation, I was a self-righteous bastard.

When I was in college and I would get all worked up about how I couldn't work with my really pretty smart Southern Baptist coach (who had a really excellent Ph.D. idea around narrative paradigm and his idea of a narrative consequence that I totally respect today and who was a pretty good guy when he wasn't getting all worked up, himself) because he was a fundamentalist who thought homosexuality was a sin and who ranted about pornography, I was a self-righteous bastard. When I told on my sister for bringing pot to a visit to see my mom that involved a 10 hour plus carride to Milwaukee because she had been such a bitch to me the entire ride up, I was an especially weasley and shitty self-righteous bastard.

And especially when I was in grad school and ready to save the world and arguing and fighting every day with my equally self-righteous, brainy, and big-hearted girlfriend and my equally self-righteous advisor and radical theorist extraordinaire, I was one self-righteous mother-fuckin' bastard.

For most of my life, I have been a seriously committed, smart, idealistic, level-headed self-righteous bastard who is ashamed of what a high-maintenance little shithead I could be (and probably still am, truth be told).

I'm sorry for that. Because it's meant that I've been full of passion and full of shit all at the same time. And because it has driven family, friends, and everyone up a fucking wall for 33 years and I 'm sorry to be the cause of all of that asspain.

My name is Ben Sutherland. And I am a self-righteous bastard. And as I point one finger at the world, I've four and more where that came from pointing back at me. I hate having folks only focus on my weaknesses, and yet I write for ages about the weaknesses of humanity. I hate people getting lost in only what's wrong with the world and not just appreciating both the world and the people who are committed to righting the wrongs, and I spend a lot of time depreciating both. I hate the idea of people getting heads full of steam of making my life miserable, but the truth is that this is sweet retribution from a world that's been absorbing my self-righteous ranting and rallying for 33 years now.

We had a really great day in Ms. Smith's reading class, today. And when behavior started spinning control in my class, today, I realized that while things were fairly relaxed and laid back in Ms. Smith's class, and while one of my kids and I talked rock and roll and the music world and all the great things to debate and discuss around it, I was something of a self-righteous bastard, today, in class, getting revved up about integers like they were the beginning and ending of my world and the kids' world, which was clear to me was not true about 5 minutes after I had sent out my third student for disrupting class.

This is why most people would rather read Mark Twain or watch Idiocracy than read some scholarly tome. Not just because they find it boring, which is their problem, since there's so much good in those tomes no matter how much energy goes into understanding them. It's because scholars can be some self-righteous bastards, is the truth, for all their liberal thinking. And the same goes for me.

Sometimes for being so smart, I can be kind of stupid, as Frito observes about Max in one of the last scenes of Mike Judge's brilliant little conservative dystopia. Or at least something of a self-righteous sumbitch.

And I don't like being boring. Or self-righteous. And I certainly don't like being a pain in the ass. And I've been all of these much of my life.

And I'm sorry for all of the poor souls who have had to put up with me. I can only hope that I wasn't all bastard or sumbitch.

But then, hope springs eternal.

Love,
Ben

Why smart kids know (or should know) that the world is not quite a meritocracy

I've been listening to Dar Williams all morning and for the last 3 or 4 days. I've been feeling really at peace, lately, with myself and my choices. I've matured and settled down quite a bit in the last year or so. And it occurred me, today, after watching Idiocracy for the third time (which you must see if you haven't) why smart kids know (or should know) that the world is not quite the meritocracy that we might wish it was.

Because Dar Williams and Mike Judge, the creator Idiocracy, are far smarter, far more idealistic, far more decent than Britney Spears and Eminen. And yet, Britney and Eminen cash in big at a younger time in their lives (who knows what the future will hold for both of them), while Dar and Mike make successful careers that are not quite so lucrative, at least up front.

Now Dar and Mike and I and most smart people are used to this, at this point in our lives. Because we're smart kids. We know what it's like not to be the most popular kids in school. And life is one long extension of school, in so many ways. Popularity rules far too often, no matter how foolish it is or foolish are the decisions that people will make to have it. And so often it confuses our judgment. We start to rationalize keeping up with it in the name of money or power or fame, all of which are acquired in liberal democracies by catering to mass appeal, even if average people may need to be challenged rather than catered to.

That is the difference between education, ideally, and politics or money or pop culture. Education challenges people. It needs to. Because people need to be challenged to learn. They also need to be appreciated and supported and are in need of far more patience than teachers and professors generally have to offer, which is one of the more important reasons why so many of them get frustrated with education and begin to give up on it, too often, in their hearts. Luckily for all of us, the rates of people getting higher levels of education is growing, largely out of the benefits, financial and otherwise, that people are beginning to recognize come with an investment in higher education and because of more flexible policies allowing and supporting more people to get more education. But more people are getting more education, which is good for them as individuals and their lives, no matter how much or how little money they make, and the culture benefits immensely from that. It becomes more liberal and democratic, long term (the current period being an exception to that trend, in many ways, as we seek to repress more liberal attitudes and openness and more authentic democratic engagement, and a confirmation of it, in other ways, as levels of engagements and disagreement and the diverse arrays of ideological and philosophical orientations engage the political and economic and cultural arenas, and as we become a more open culture, often and perhaps generally, despite political pressures to the contrary), and it becomes more sustainably so, where people internalize liberal democratic attitudes more reliably rather than having political groups attempt to impose that on the culture.

Pop and mass culture needs to be freely expressed and needs a much freedom as possible, I think. But the culture and all of us are in better shape the more that nobler values - which are not always or even often popular or appealing to the desire for immediate gratification that generally has more mass appeal, as Mike Judge's brilliant movie illustrates and critiques -lead us, individually and as a culture.

Smart kids learn this principle, intuitively, at a much earlier age. Because being smart and taking school seriously is generally not popular in school. Certainly not before college, where it is often seriously unpopular. So we are not as surprised with Britney Spears or Eminen get rewarded more than we do in a baser way, with money or fame. Or even why people with a dearth of serious intellectual credentials get rewarded in politics. Because power often works the same way, although democratic politics is an arena where people also often vote for their higher aspirations as much as their baser impulses. "I may not be smart, but I may vote for someone who is smarter," is more common in politics than in pop music.

But smarter folks are used to this at a much earlier age, is the truth. Because it's their lives, often. As they grow older, they either accept it or resign themselves to it and cater to it to make their fortunes. Or they try to make it better. Through education, through writing and talking, through non-profit work and, often, through politics (though apart from the on-going political discussions this is a much less effective way to lift peoples' horizons than routes that more directly support and challenge people to think better, do better, and be better).

And Dar Williams and Mike Judge and a million other folks embody this tendency for smarter folks and smarter ideas to be overlooked by popular trends.

We still have a long way to go to making America and the world a meritocracy. We will get better as we make more honest and better choices about the matter, I think. And as we create more room for engagement with one another to promote more honest and better choices.

But, in the meantime, smarter folks should know better that what is popular is not at all what is best. Mike Judge's Idiocracy is a brilliant illustration of this little bit of wisdom and many other great perspectives on the culture. I highly recommend it when you get a chance.

I've got grading and lesson plans and a paper and a behavior plan to work on. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Love,
Ben

Being in love with Dar Williams in the background

Dar Williams is one of my favorite artists. She's writes and sings beautifully. And I think I understand better, now, why she doesn't get radio play (I've heard her once on an NPR affiliate).

Dar Williams is lovemaking music. And most people don't feel or share love with one another enough to make love the way Dar sings. It's kind of tragic, really.

Because if you ever made love to Dar Williams, you would never want to do anything else for the rest of your life.

It's sad to me that most people don't feel love or share love in their lives like Dar Williams. But I'd rather be someone who feels that sort of love than any of the billions of people in the world who don't really ever feel the kind of love where they would find themselves making love with Dar in the background.

Tonight is my night to remember being in love with Dar Williams in the background.

Love,
Ben

My dream vacation

She'd kill me if she read this. But I was just sitting here, tonight, making excuses not to go to bed when I thought about what my dream vacation would be before I die.

I've always loved the idea of traveling to Europe and visiting all the original sites of emerging Western civilization. I'd love to travel to Mexico again, maybe see the friends I made when I taught English in Cancun. I'd love to visit each of the continents, and I've always had a dream of retracing Mark Twain's voyage aboard the Quaker City through Europe and the Middle East, which was the basis for his hilarious observations of his American counterparts in Innocents Abroad.

But the truth is that my dream vacation would be to take the 20 hour road trip that Brandi and I took from Wichita to Washington D.C. when we were 22 and 23, and spend a good long time walking and talking our way around the sites of Washington D.C. Especially the Holocaust Museum and that grungy little building that housed Theo Brown's beautiful little National Days of Dialogue and maybe visit that little apartment we stayed in that summer with Wendy and Iftaekar.

I know. It's a dream I'm not supposed to have. Brandi's married, today. I'm not supposed to think like that.

But that's my dream vacation. Just because I would love to be able to revisit that time and place with someone who knows why its so special to me.

I was sitting here listening to Dar Williams, and remembering this awesome little outdoor concert we went to in Washington, D.C. to see Dar, and seeing Wendy raise her hands and sway in the wind to Iowa in a moment of peace for all of us.

And I thought, "I'd love to go back there. And talk about that time with Brandi, sometime."

Love,
Ben

Getting old

I've come to view a lot of the differences I have with the current political period as a generation gap, as much as anything else. I identify with young people. I not only do not relish getting old, I plan on doing everything I can to stay young, even as I like growing up and being more mature. For my sake, and for the sake of noone else, really, except those, kids especially, who I would like to serve better and raise better and be a better example to.

But I don't want to ever get old. I watch all these older teachers I work with and how worked up they get that their children are so much worse these days, so much less respectful, so much less, well, old, as their elders, and I can't help but think, "Haven't you ever been young in your life?"

The answer for most of them, sadly, is yes, but too long ago to really remember or appreciate the experience.

There are many exceptions to that rule, and many older teachers are really wonderful mentors to me. I have a teacher I work with, right now, Ms. Smith, who has been a really wonderful mentor and I've really loved working with her, even as we have some of these generation gap differences, as well. She works at it and I work at it and between the two of us, we learn a lot about the kids and one another.

And that's how life and relationships between older people and younger people should be. People working to get to know one another and understand one another and appreciate one another, not people trying to control one another or pressure one another or bully one another. People sharing with one another, in the all too brief time that we all have with one another.

I like maturing. A lot. I like mellowing out and having an easier and wiser life.

But I have no interest in getting old, when that means that I complain about kids these days and how much they resist when I want to put them in their place because I really know best, after all, if they could ever come to appreciate my experience and wisdom.

If you have wisdom, offer it, has always been my motto. If you have to impose it, it's probably not so wise, is my experience. And it's almost always out of an arrogance that there is no need to consult those I impose upon, anyways. And that truly is the hallmark of getting old.

I don't want to ever get old like that. Curmudgeonly and always bitter that noone will do things my way or the way I want. It is the arrogance that comes with age, I think, that I would rather leave alone.

I started journaling on-line about my life and thoughts when I was in my 30's. I envy and really appreciate all those kids who can do it for a lifetime and look back at who they were and what they were thinking and appreciate how far they and the world has come.

But no matter how far I come, I don't want to ever get old.

I want to be learning something new when I finally check out. I want to learn something profound and important just as I'm calling it quits. Either that or making love. Or maybe laying in bed with my wife. Or holding my children. Or grandchildren. Or great-grandchildren.

Maybe I could be in a college class and just kick it right there in middle of an important discussion. Or be reading or writing a book and then find my maker.

Abraham Maslow apparently had a whole slew of ideas and papers he was working on when he finally died that were collected and published in the form of one of the most brilliant books I've ever read, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

That's not a bad way to go. Though making love would be a pretty good way to go, too. Being in love beats writing or teaching or learning any day, anyway. And if you don't know that, it's because you haven't really been in love before.

I wonder if most older people remember what it was like to have never fallen in love before and be discovering the world in your own time, in your own way, out of your own reflections and experiences, and discovering the world for the first time?

If they don't, they should try. Because having your heart and mind open like that are the only ways to go through life and really get the most out of the experience.

Love,
Ben