Our Institutions are Failing Us

The shooting in Florida this month reminds me again that our institutions are failing us.  The FBI was alerted, the police were alerted, multiple times, but nothing was done. Police on site failed to control the scene; with the shooter still unidentified and free students ran from the school in all directions while the police watched.

Recently Vladimir Putin announced the development of weapons systems that basically make half of our military obsolete.  Why did our intelligence agencies with their multi-billion dollar budgets fail to detect this?  If half of what he claimed is true, our aircraft carrier groups could not survive the first few weeks of a shooting war.  Our missile defenses also could not stop these weapons which can be fired from a multitude of locations, fly long range, fly at super high speeds and evade radar detection all the while homing in with nuclear or conventional warheads on a specific target.

Axis of Evil

I am thinking there should be a new axis of evil enshrined for America.  Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump conspiring to make America small again.  First Bush with his trillion dollar invasion of the Middle East.  That money was robbed from our economy and the economy of our future.  Add to that his expansion of Government with the so-called Department of Homeland Security.  Second we have Obama with his insidious increases in regulations over every area of our lives.  The idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant is absurd, but it provides an excuse for a raft of new regulations.  And his embrace of identity politics, a sure fire way to divide and diminish and something based on the ideas of victimhood, and blame assigned to artificially created identity groups.  Finally we have Trump who has blown the Federal deficit sky high and now is trying to trash the economy a la Smoot Hawley with tariffs on steel and aluminum.

It is time for the American people to demand major institutional change because our country is at risk.

Che Guevara

  Ernesto Guevara, Tambien Conocido como El Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

A Review

I just finished reading Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s biography of Che Guevara.    Che  kept a diary for most of his adult life which is the main source of information for the author.   If you are already a Che fan, there is plenty you will like about this book.  He is idealistic, committed, fearless, determined, brilliant, and charismatic.  If you are a critic or a foe, you will have to read into it the negatives.  The executions he directed or carried out himself are mentioned as being in the course of battle or of enemies whose crimes against the revolution were indisputable.  He is uncompromising, fanatical, self-centered.  These attributes are evident in this biography.  He is a dedicated communist and fiercely anti-American revolutionary who succeeded in planting in Cuba an economic system which could not function.  And he was determined to do the same in the Congo and throughout Latin America.  But he misjudged these country’s preparedness for revolution as well as the efficacy of communist economics.  He was in short a miss-guided fanatic who died in an ill-prepared armed invasion of a country that was not his own. 

There are many aspects of Che’s life that might have been mentioned in a book on his life but were not.  Nothing is mentioned about the events leading up to the Cuban revolution, or the history of Cuba, the history America’s relationship with Cuba or with Latin America in general.  No judgments are made or evaluations of the revolution or its resultant government or of the history that followed.  No evaluation is made of  Cuba’s tryst with the Soviet Union which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, which Che was prepared to see come about.   Taibo is one of my favorite authors and I now feel I know something about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and the events in his life.  But I do not feel informed about the world he lived in.

  National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon.

      After Obama took office in 2009,  one might have thought there would be a change in policies with the change in presidents.  But Obama, who had voted against the invasion of Iraq, and who promised to close Guantanamo, maintained nearly every aspect of the Bush foreign policy.  This article by a professor of international law at Tufts University helps to explain why it makes very little difference who the president is, and why voting and citizen participation in government seems to be a waste of time.  

Philosophy of Language for Socio Linguistics

I recently had to write a philosophy of language for the sociolinguistics course I am taking.

                                

A Philosophy of Language

Introduction

     This paper might be called principles of language teaching or an applied philosophy of language.  When I wrote my first paper in an applied linguistics course, after much thought, I concluded that the key thing to know about language was that it was  a system of abstract symbols used to communicate the thoughts of one person to another person or group of people. I also wrote,  knowing how one group can set upon another by the way they talk I wrote that language was one of the key elements of personal and group identity.   In my short and quickly written philosophy of language at the start of this class, the only thing I remember writing down was that language was often used for play, for cleverness, joking, teasing, and verbal back and forth of conversation. It is used, probably most often as pure entertainment.  In other words, while teachers are teaching social studies and literature, math and geography, students are chatting it up endlessly whenever the opportunity to escape the academic lockdown arises.  Wherever people gather, deeply contextualized use of language is going on for no other ostensible purpose than to pass the time.    I have since been introduced through the Applied Linguistics program to many philosophers, linguists and social analysts who deepened and broadened my perspective on what language is, what it does and how it is used.  I will discuss the authors in particular whose views I have incorporated into my own in this paper, but I will end the paper by simply listing some of  the principles of language that guide me in my professional and personal life.

Beyond Communication

    Looking again at language as a communication device, an abstract system of signs both written and spoken, the first question that comes to mind is what exactly is being communicated, what is in the mind of one person that needs to transfer to another.  On one level there are innumerable little necessities of life that must be communicated such as “I’m hungry” or “we are all going to meet down by the river after dark” or whatever social, personal and functional things that need to be communicated for life and social life to go on.  On another level, our identities, who we are, and purposes, why we are here, are completely dealt with on the abstract level through language in the chief form of narratives or stories.  People seem to be uniquely motivated to tell and to listen to stories and within those stories find the meaning and purpose of everything.  Some thinkers have even extended the interpretive nature of language to encompass all thought and consciousness.  In other words, consciousness itself derives from what we believe and all that we believe derives from the socio-linguistic milieu we are borne into.  In this case, what is communicated from person to person is much more than immediate thought, but in  fact thought is being transferred from the larger social pattern, a pattern existing outside of any one mind, into the individual’s mind.    This view is mentioned by Butler, (Butler 1997) in her discussion of Althusser’s concept of interpellation.  A similar viewpoint is revealed in the interview with William Labov.

I think that the integration of all these studies and areas into a single perspective depends upon the concept of the speech community as an overarching social reality. The notion of a social fact—that language exists in the community exterior to the individual—is our central theme. The way in which this social pattern is grasped by the individual speaker and the way it changes over time is our central problem (Labov quoted in Gordon, p. 350). 

We can see that even if one does not follow this line of reasoning to its furthest reaching conclusion, language is much more than the simple communication of thoughts between individual minds.  It is a social pattern in which is embedded our world view. 

Linguistic Hegemony

     Bel Hooks speaks of Standard English as the “language of conquest and domination, (hooks 1994), although she is careful to say that it is not the language itself that does injury but the oppressor who shapes it into a weapon of domination.  Although I find the concept of a unique oppressor to be problematic, I agree that language itself is shaped by people with power to control the majority of the population.  At one time I briefly studied business; the one thing I learned in that series of courses that has stuck with me for decades is that businesses, governments, agencies of governments, including the military and other large moneyed institutions routinely employ professionals to shape the perceptions of the public in their favor.   This is done on an extremely sophisticated psychological level through the making of associations, the controlled release of information and the control of the news and historical narratives. I think one of my problems with hooks is that she attempts, without the money to project it to the mass audience, to re-construct the narrative towards her viewpoint by using words like oppressor, dominator and colonizer.  This is what Butler calls re-signification, the turning of words and associations made with words in your favor, (Butler 1997).   The dominant narrative in America is deeply rooted.  It is principally believed by the populations of those groups who benefit the most, meaning the core groups who built America at the expense of the slaves and the native Americans. But I would argue that even white males are manipulated and exploited making it difficult to easily classify oppressor and oppressed.    The philosophy of this writer is that there is a reality beyond the socially constructed, but we will often have to adapt to the reigning narrative which will usually be too powerful to resist or overcome by any individual.  Resistance to change or to threats to the dominant narrative takes the form of opposition to bilingual classrooms and support for English-only laws. Change can and will happen but any replacement narrative must have equal power as the existing one, meaning, persuasive power and actual power behind it.

Discourse

     James Gee’s concept of Discourse, (Gee 1999, p.12), is essential to any philosophy of language because this concept identifies the roots of culture and cultural identity that lie much deeper than the level of language alone.  Discourse includes all the related behaviors and expectations integrated with language that are associated with a particular group.  Discourse, according to Gee is something one is “apprenticed” into.  The job of a teacher is to apprentice students into the Discourse of the academic world as well as to teach math, science and literature.  Many minority students begin the school significantly behind, because the western academic Discourse taught in our schools is aligned with the larger dominant cultural Discourse in our society of which they have not been a part.  Thus many students who come from other countries or groups traditionally excluded from the dominant culture such as blacks and hispanics will find a double challenge upon entering schools of not only learning the subject matter but of having to catch up with the pre-existing cultural knowledge of the other students  without a specific effort on the part of the school system to teach it, (Macedo as quoted in  Bartolomé 1998).

     In addition to lack of familiarity with the dominant Discourse, minority students will often find that the Discourse they have been apprenticed into in their homes and neighborhoods, because it differs from the dominant,  is not only misunderstood but belittled in the school system.  Very often the attitude is “because we have come to dominate the country you came from with this system, it is superior to yours”.  Minority students need to be apprenticed into the dominant culture but in such a way that their own culture is not denigrated, (Bartolomé 1998).  Misunderstanding, denigration, and a failure to specifically teach the basics of the dominant Discourse is likely to result in minority students quickly becoming discouraged and  withdrawing from participation in the system that is charged with their education. 

     Compounding this problem of lack of cultural capital is actual resistance to acquiring it.    A Discourse may be perceived as inimical to the interests of the learner because it is a direct supplantation of the existing one or because it is taught as superior the the existing one.    This resistance to assimilation encountered by many teachers teaching minority or immigrant students becomes the essential challenge of a teacher, especially an ELL teacher; how does one teach the dominant Discourse essential to succeed in mainstream society without threatening the pre-existing cultural identity of the students.   The answer has to be to develop a genuine appreciation for alternative ways of speaking and of expression of ideas, (hooks 1994), (Bartolomé 1998).  It is only in the context of being treated with respect that a student will agree to adopt a new, potentially threatening idea.

   Logic and Correctness

     So-called contextualized language is rife with elements that communicate far more than the words themselves.  In this sense, I am not talking about language that simply does not conform to standard English but about language that is delivered through a medium that imbues it with context, for example Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech has a certain layer of context when read, an added layer when heard spoken and a further dimension when one listens to the speech and watches the speaker.  Thomas Reid postulated a natural language that is fully contextualized and an artificial language that is fully decontextualized, (Reid 1764).   According to Reid, the further one was from natural language which involved, voice modulation, eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, perhaps sobs or laughter and so on, the less powerful it was.  Written language was the least powerful manifestation of language.  Today, more and more of our language is of this decontextualized, cerebral variety.  Increasingly, to function in society we must be able to avail ourselves of decontextualized language, (Zuboff 1988).  And here I am not speaking of culturally decontextualized but physically decontextualized language, one purely related through the action of the mind to abstract symbols.     Oddly enough, this type of language has been readily adapted by young people of all cultural backgrounds if one observes how universal social media and the cell phone have become. 

     The question remains, is language always understood through the lense of cultural conventions?  Is it possible that there is some aspect of language that can be reduced to logic, irrespective of culture?  We see that all languages are rule driven and that the rules relate to the transfer of meaning, when the rules are broken, no meaning is transferred or the wrong meaning is transferred.  It is in this sense that I believe as part of my own philosophy of language, that it is possible to teach “correct” English usage while at the same time allowing for variations in rhetorical style.  Very often a conformity to one set of rules will have to be taught, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary vary from dialect to dialect and even from Discourse to Discourse, therefore we are back to teaching a select variety, usually the dominant variety which by convention has become the standard.  Bartolomé uses the term linguistically contextualized to describe text whose purpose is clear communication that leaves little room for ambiguity. This type of text is essential to written communication in a complex, knowledge based society but it should not be considered superior,  (Bartolomé 1998). 

     Bizzell leaves room open for not only variations in rhetorical style but also in language and dialect in what she refers to as hybrid Discourses, (Bizzell 2000).  This is not unlike a long established tradition of including works from different languages and time periods in academic discourse.  Academics are expected to know or be open to learning other languages.  Scholars for years have treated Latin, Greek, Provencal, 16^th century English, and even 10^th century English as equally valuable for creative, poetic value and for scientific value.  Now is perhaps the time to include some other non-traditional texts as well in the study of any academic subject.

Principles

     On a day to day basis, I have general principles that are constantly in mind when I am considering or teaching language.  Some of these arise from my general personal philosophy and some from thinkers we have studied in this class on sociolinguistics and others I have taken in the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.  They are, briefly considered, as follows:

     Principle number one is that all dialects are equal but one will be socially dominant.  Therefore it will be thought to be the correct one and will confer status on its speakers, subordinating speakers of other dialects.  As teachers of the “correct” version, we must not denigrate the way or the language that other people speak in any way.

     Principle number two,  language has power to build up or tear down.  It has power to injure and power to heal.  The first purpose of any teacher is to use that power whenever possible to encourage and to edify their students.  Teaching is using language to make connections to knowledge that will strengthen and encourage students in their personal and academic lives.   

     Principle number three is that language is a vehicle for ideology.  The way a society believes itself to be, or wants to see itself will be expressed not just in outward sharing of mythology but in all the subtle ways words can reinforce worldview.  This is highly problematic for school systems and teachers which try at one level to avoid controversy but at another level choose a version of the common narrative to envelope and nurture the information they teach.  There is probably no way around communicating one’s personal world view, hopefully it is not too cynical or too rigid, but that it gives hope and purpose to students to better their lives.

     Principle number four is that language is an identity marker.  It is perhaps the most significant means we use to distinguish the members of one group from another.  It is perhaps the strongest unifying force for people and the first means used to identify threats to the group identity and survival.    One cannot teach multi-cultural students without allowing them to establish their own identities and their own world views which at times will clash with yours.

     Principle number five is that we teach language including, all the elements of listening, speaking, reading and writing, because of the power it gives our students to effect change in their own lives, to get a job, to change someone’s mind, to explain, persuade, argue a case, cause a revolution, or to stop one.  These are things done with the power of words wielded with skill, the skill that they hopefully learn in school.  Language is not a game, it has a purpose.

      Finally, principle number six is that language allows us to fully express ourselves as human beings, to bond with others, to enjoy life, to move people, to astound, to surprise, to come to a deeper understanding of life.  This is an element available to all, it is not usually taught in school. We must understand that its complexity and the complexity of our students will always be more than we can fully comprehend.

           

REFERENCES

Bartolomé, L. (1998) The Mis-Teaching of Academic Discourses:  The Politics of Language. Toronto: Harper Collins.

Butler, J.  (1997).  Excitable speech: A  politics of the performative:  New York. Routledge. 

Gee, J. P. (1999). Discourses, socio-culturally situated educational theory, and the failure problem. University of California, Los Angeles, CA.

Gordon, M. (2006). Interview with William Labov. Journal of English Linguistics, 34(4), 332-351.DOI: 10.1177/0075424206294308. http://eng.sagepub.com/content/34/4/332

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress; Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

hooks, bell. (2000).  Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York, NY: Routledge.

Reid, Thomas, (1764). An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Retrieved April 6, 2014 from  http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/reid1764.pdf.

Stalmaszczyk, Piotr.  Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. Retrieved 23 February 2014, from  http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/231

Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. United States of America, Basic Books Inc.

Snowden and the NSA

       Control is the principal reason to gather and store information on people.  Power brokers, especially within the bureaucracies of government have always done this.  Robert Moses, who amassed tremendous political power in his career as a petty bureaucrat working for the state of New York,  maintained files on anyone of significance to him politically and regularly updated those files with new information as it was available.  Years later, when he wanted something from that person or wanted to head off something that person was doing, out came the file.  If there was any dirt, anything that might have been forgotten, that information was used as a bludgeon against them.  J Edgar Hoover also maintained files for his political advantage as head of the FBI and used the information he had to threaten even a sitting president.  There is no one who does not have a skeleton somewhere that can be unearthed, that does not have a secret, a past indiscretion, a bankruptcy, a run in with the law, a mistress or a lover unknown to their spouse, a habit the children do not know about and should never know about.  Added to this are the innumerable laws and regulations passed by the government or its agencies which are transgressed by all of us at one time or another.  The government is fond of using IRS audits as punishment for political transgressions, but in addition to this are the increasingly convoluted web of regulations that govern everything we do.  The mere threat of surveillance will color the discourse which takes place in America.  Any terrorists who are actually capable of doing great harm probably do not use social media or unencrypted email to communicate.

     That the government is already using sophisticated techniques to control the population is evident in the carefully structured and regulated information flow to the media over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Our leaders do not want to see a repeat of the debacle of the popular protests against the Vietnam war.  Information in these wars has been more tightly controlled than in any other war.  Our media served chiefly as a cheering section as the bombs landed on Baghdad and the tanks rolled across the desert from Kuwait.  It is through control of the narrative that our government chiefly controls us.  Violent means available to control the population are not necessary when a superior effect is achieved by public relations professionals.  But if you add to that the threat of retribution by virtue of access to private knowledge of any individual, the effect on any organized social protest is chilling.  The rubber will hit the road for this system when there comes a real danger of social uprising or mass civil disobedience.  If the economy ever fell as far as some pundits predict to levels lower than those of the great depression,  there will be trouble.  In the last depression, people who had money were seriously worried that such an event or uprising could occur bringing the siezure of power and assets by a completely different cadre of people than those who possessed it at the time.  The world had just witnessed it take place in Russia and in Mexico.   The NSA is now in the business of making revolution impossible under any circumstances for any reason.  If someone else, read the government, has a gun  over you,  you are very likely to be robbed or killed by that government. 

     The fact that it was a private company that has access to the data, Snowden, a private citizen, said he could find out about anyone he wanted through the information they had, complicates both the prosecutorial and the constitutional issues.  This is a highly profitable government -industry complex which has access to limitless taxpayer funding in order to control those same taxpayers.  Much of the NSA budget is in the so-called black budget, which is concealed even from the majority of Congress under the guise of national security.  Snowden’s crime was to  betray the anti-american NSA.  But the real crime is the failure of our elected officials who swear an oath to defend the constitution to put a stop to this clear violation of the right of the people to be secure in their homes and papers.  Obama should be impeached, the bums in congress, if they are not prosecuted themselves, should be voted out of office.  This of course will not happen.  The activist portion of our population is already basically powerless to affect any real change and the majority will continue to struggle financially to pay for the giant leach called government attached to their backs.

Who Killed JFK?

     We will probably never know who killed John Kennedy as he rode through Dallas in November of 1963.  No one saw the gunman pull the trigger.  Those who would have been the major players in an assassination conspiracy at the time are all dead.  I was nine years old at the time of the assassination.  It has haunted me all my life, especially because my mother was one of the first conspiracy theorists who read article after article about the oddities surrounding the murder.  The generally accepted wisdom believed by the majority of the populace at the time was that Oswald was the killer.  We believed our government and we believed our media pundits who told us the simple story of a single fanatical gunman.  "I'm a patsy", Oswald said on national television,  rolling his eyes in disgust.  Before he had a chance to tell his story, he was dead.   The CIA,  the Russians or Cubans and the Italian mob all have been the accused in one or another hypothetical scenario.  The author Gerald Posner almost won a Pulitzer prize for his book Case Closed laying all the blame on Oswald.  I read this book and found it convincing although, I could not at the time contest or verify any of his evidence.  The House Select Committee on Assassinations also blamed Oswald, but, declared that there was a high probability of a conspiracy.  For some people, the case will never truly be declared closed.  But what does it matter?  It was a long time ago, no one is left to punish, never mind be found guilty.  Yes, we would like to know the truth, but we also have lives to live and things to do.  What does the truth matter, especially if we can never really know?  If it was a conspiracy from within the government,  it was a coup d'etat, something which has been commonplace throughout history but which is not supposed to happen in America.  The murder of rival leaders has been the rule not the exception since the dawn of time.  If it was a coup d'etat, it de-legitimizes our government and even our country itself.  That would matter.

     One of the best historical biographies I have read was Robert Caro's story of Robert Moses in The Power Broker.  I found it so good that when he began his series on Lyndon Johnson I read every volume as they were published.  Caro claims that in all his research he encountered no credible evidence that Johnson was involved in the assassination of JFK,  although, even in his extensive notes, there is no indication that he was looking for such evidence.    However, it was while reading the first volume, Path to Power in 1983,  that I became convinced that  Johnson and his financial and political backers engineered Kennedy's death.
   
      Most of the lines of evidence for this crime have been so muddled that little will be known for sure.  Conspiracy theorists will say there are layers and layers of evidence,  all of it in dispute.  But other than circumstantial or controversial evidence,  there are some witnesses.  Billy Sol Estes, Johnson's business associate in Texas and convicted con man testified to a grand jury in 1983 that Johnson was behind the assassination.  Johnson's mistress claims  in an interview that the day before the murder Johnson told her, "after today those sons of bitches, (the Kennedys), will never humiliate me again." The interview with her is on YouTube.  Jack Ruby,  in a recorded interview, states that if Adlai Stevenson had been Vice President there never would have been an assassination.   Johnson had the personal, political and financial motivation and he had the means at hand to orchestrate and cover up the assassination.  He wanted to be president, it was his life's ambition and his backers were powerful people in Texas who stood to make and did make millions of dollars in a Johnson presidency.   Johnson's biggest financial backer, Brown and Root, a construction company now known as Halliburton, was granted enormous contracts to build facilities during the Vietnam War.

     For me, this is the version of events that finally puts all the pieces together, it is the one that makes the most sense and seems the most likely once the blinders are off about the fallibility of our system.  It makes sense too that Johnson could never have his bitter political enemy Robert Kennedy in the presidency where he was very likely to have found out the truth.