Name-ism

What is in a name?

I couldn't help but put that there; it's poetic.

I've been thinking today about names and our attachment to them. I mean names of ideologies, primarily, and also names of groups. I am an American, I am a capitalist. I call myself this and I belong to a group, ostensibly. This has nothing to do with my behavior.

This came up because I've been seeing some very prevalent anti-communist rhetoric recently, and it's just so strange to me that the previous generation is still so dreadfully caught up in the red scare. But here's the thing: they say "Communism" as though it is the boogie-man, but they really don't have any idea of what Communism entails. They don't know what Marxism is, or Leninism, or Stalinism. They don't seem to understand that Soviet Russia never actually achieved a Marxist Communism, because, of course, Marx's Communism entails a rather prevalent amount of democracy. But that was never seen in Russia, nor in any other countries which we generally think of as Communist.

To my mind, the fixture that made Soviet Communism so awful was its complete lack of democratic principles. It was a terrible tyranny in most every sense of the word. The people had no public or private freedoms, and they were made to feel terrified by their own government.

And yet today we are actually seeing some very odd opinions gaining ground in the US, for instance that all public institutions are basically communist. Public schooling, for instance, has come under fire by the new right--I might just capitalize that, the New Right. Seems apropos.

While I could rant again about how the New Right/Libertarians basically fall between favoring oligarchy and anarchy, that's not what I want to bring up.

What I want to bring up is how odd it is for us to attach ourselves so strongly to words rather than to reality. Despite the fact that Rick Perry does nothing in favor of a free market and is not fiscally responsible, people flock to his nomenclature, to his mythology. The mythology is more important than the facts, largely because he presents the myth as his public face and the facts are hidden. And when the facts are not hidden, it is easy enough to dispute them in favor of the myth, because of course 'you can't trust the left wing media.' (I'm not ranting about that either, really).

Now, this isn't at all limited to the right. The left is just as bad, and I catch myself doing it. I catch myself feeling like I don't want to read something I might disagree with because I am actually fearful, at some level, of being disabused of my beliefs. I imagine somebody might think me odd for saying that, but I think its just because I'm both more self-aware and more honest than most people. People hate to have their beliefs challenged. They would rather have actual physical harm done, preferably to somebody else, than to have their beliefs challenged. This is what is at the heart of religious persecution, of course, and at the heart of our very dangerous lack of public dilemmas today, I think.

It is the medias fault, but also our own, because we do not personally, most of us, go out and try to find truths. We just listen to the people on the television who we agree with. I think both Arendt and Chomsky point to this as being a result of lacking adequate political voice, and I don't know that I disagree with them. It certainly seems to create a vicious circle of ignorance.

I hope you can all find your way out of it. Send your facts to me; I want to know them.

Holes in the Story

So another article about Perry's higher education reforms came out in the statesman this week. This article conveniently avoids, over the course of two pages, any meaningful analysis, preferring to quote back and forth between government reformers and the academics who are resistant to the particular reforms suggested. Absent in the article are any meaningful facts to help us decide whether the reforms are good or not, and also absent are the actual reforms. What is present is the somewhat unidentified conflict between 'market driven' and 'not market driven.' A cursory look at the comments section below the article verifies this; the discussion is not about what the suggestions are, they are about whether or not a it is appropriate for a university to treat its students as 'customers'.

[Always, always, always absent is any discussion of what an education is about. Granted, that is outside the scope of the article, but it is ignored as a rule...or rather, never even conceived of. One might suppose that the market-like university advocates would say that their 'customers' would decide what an education should consist of, but that just brings up more questions and I don't want to put words in their mouths]

So, I had to do some footwork, but I did manage to find the list of the "Seven Breakthrough Solutions" within the framework of UTs anti-7 solutions protest site. So far I have not found a source for the raw suggestions, so hopefully those wily UT professors and deans haven't stripped them of necessary detail.

I will maybe go into these suggestions myself later, but needless to say, the first article I posted up there (and most of the articles I have found are more or less the same) is a good example of bad journalism. It quotes people from 'both sides of the story' without actually going in any depth to explain both sides. It creates public interest but does little to promote anything beyond the ideological debate between market-fundamentalists and everybody else.

Certainly it got me to go out and seek the answers as to whats going on, but 1)I'm better than everybody else in that way, and 2) At the length of the article, it could have been much more concise and informative than it was. It basically rehashes the same thought over and over.