War and Myth XII

One huge American myth—that most of seem to believe with all of our being—is that we all have hundreds if not thousands of friends. (Check Face book.) Everybody’s a friend. If you met him once, last year, he’s a friend.
I very deliberately try to use the word “acquaintance”. I have very few friends. My neighbor and I have known and cooperated with each other for twenty years. We are just reaching the point where we might become actual friends.
But “everybody’s a “friend”—remains a fervently held myth among many, many Americans. It’s something they seem to NEED to believe. I remember substituting in one of the lower grades a few years ago. A little girl came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, “Susie says she does not like me!”
She obviously expected me to deal with Susie—make Susie like her. Most teachers would have pulled Susie aside and had a long, soulful discussion on the necessity of liking one another. I startled the little girl very much by saying something quite other.
“It is Susie’s democratic right not to like you. She doesn’t have to like anyone. You don’t have to like anyone. She may not hurt you. She may not say bad things about you or damage your property, but there is no reason why she must like you.”
She went back to her seat. (Fifteen minutes later she and Susie were chattering together like magpies.) She typifies much of what is and has been wrong with American foreign policy. We want to get our own way (completely understandable in a great power), and we go into paroxysms of self-recrimination if some nation says it doesn’t like us.
We view Britain’s Prime Minister Palmerston as a cynic because he made the sensible observation that “Great Powers have no friends, only interests”. But I doubt very much that he would have wept if “Susie” had told him she didn’t like him. He ran a very successful foreign policy.
It goes deep into the heart of American mythology to believe that we must be liked by everyone we meet—and that, ideally, we must like them.
Why?
This need to be liked reached the height of silliness in the last Presidential Election. We were actually judging our candidates on which one of them was better liked by the Susie’s of the world! Obama won a pot full of votes by appearing—as a CANDIDATE!!—with crowds of cheering Europeans. (Do they vote?)
(We saw what that was worth when he tried to move the Olympics to Chicago and when he tried to paste together an agreement in Copenhagen. His outreach to the Muslim world from Cairo didn’t amount to all that much, either. Susie has to respect—and even fear—you before she gets cooperative. Lord Palmerston understood that.)
A comedian has to worry whether audiences like him enough to laugh; a politician has to worry whether or not his constituents like him enough to keep him in office—but someone making foreign policy and deciding on peace and war should not have likeability as his highest priority.
As any salesman can tell you, once you’ve got the prospective buyer concerned over whether or not you like him—whether or not the buyer is concerned about the salesman’s good will and friendship, he’s GOT him. The poor chap can be manipulated by his own needs into buying almost anything. It’s an effective tool, playing on someone’s need to be liked.
Let’s let neither our friends nor our enemies play us like that. It’s nice if you do—it’s perfectly all right if you choose not to. We can live without Susie’s friendship when necessary. We don’t have, and we don’t need to have, a thousand friends. None of us do.

Iraq--A War is a War is a War

They’re going to rename the Iraq War. Defense Secretary Gates insists this sends a “strong message” about what the war is all about. (I wish we’d known what it was all about back in 2003, don’t you?) Instead of calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (did you remember it was ever called that? I did not.), we’re going to call it “Operation New Dawn”.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.

No Child Left Behind--A Fantasy

One of the things Obama recently suggested doing is making major revisions to the “No Child Left Behind” act that Bush and Kennedy put through early in Bush’s presidency. Not a bad idea. The bill was flawed in many ways.
For one thing it assumed that a teacher, no matter how good at teaching he or she may be, is actually capable of motivating children. In many cases this is false. First of all, a child’s primary motivation—or lack thereof—comes from parents. Peers come in second and the teacher is, at best, a poor third.
I can tell you from bitter experience that if the parents don’t see any value in school and they communicate that notion to the kid, there is very rarely any way you can reach him or her. Parental indifference—or hostility—is often an insurmountable barrier to an education. If you’re in a school where a substantial number of parents feel that way, you’re dead.
I’ve sat in too many classes where the kids look at an assignment, sneer, and leave it untouched on their desk. Ask them to pick it up and they will agree—and then put it down on the other side of the backpack. Federal laws aren’t going to make him or her pick it up.
Remember, you may no longer paddle a child or threaten him in such a way as to make him feel humiliated—so what do you have to work with? Nothing. Throw the kid out of the room because he is disrupting everyone else and he’s happy to leave.
Hard core recalcitrants do not respond to positive motivation, promises of a brighter future or appeals to the better nature. Ask the prison guards who will one day superintend them—and there are, year by year, more and more of this kind of kid.
There’s another issue. “No Child Left Behind” demanded that all teachers have class hours or certificates to prove their competence in a field. That has its dicey aspects as well. I’m thinking of a very good middle school history teacher I knew.
He’d majored in music, but he’d switched to history years ago. He was very, very good at it (I enjoyed talking history with him when I was in that school.) Under “No Child”, he was booted from history and sent back to find a music job—where he had academic credits but hadn’t worked in decades. “No Child” allowed no exceptions, not even sane ones.
The worst example I knew of concerned a man who spent twenty-three years developing a course in video editing. He bought cameras and equipment himself; he spent hours and years setting up a huge lab, and he mastered—and taught—all manner of arcane software. His class was hugely popular; kids almost stood in line to get in.
But back when he was in college, there were no courses for teachers in this subject. He had no academic background. “No Child” declared him unfit to teach video editing or filming or anything else to do with cameras and computers.
He was sent to the middle school to teach a subject he had once taken courses in. (He took his own equipment home with him.) They hired a young woman who had taken a course or two in video; her major was art.
She had no idea what he did or what the stuff in his lab did. They eventually broke up the lab; she went back to Detroit to teach art the next year—and the course is no longer offered at that high school. No one else had any idea how.
To bring “No Child Left Behind” into the real world will require a lot more than a glance at some transcripts. We’ll have to look at what a teacher can actually DO—and we’ll have to figure out how to motivate an awful lot of indifferent parents.
Baring that, you might as well burn the dollars as waste them on schools—which were never designed to do what we’re asking of them. And cannot.