TAP's Courtney Martin on the absence of youth activism

She says it's all gone to college campuses and that there is a downside:

Today's youth activism is largely enacted within the gated fortresses of higher learning. Students are overwhelmingly and often motivated by applying to law school or resumé-building. (How do you think they got into these undergraduate institutions in the first place?) They funnel their outrage into weekly club meetings and awareness campaigns that look good on paper -- activities that convey to future employers and institutions that they are socially involved and aware but not at odds with the system. Students seem to join sanctioned, existing clubs, rather than launch their own radical actions, without much resistance or critical questioning. Perhaps they've been socialized to accept the status quo, but even more, I believe they simply don't have the time or energy to start innovative revolutions from scratch because they are so busy taking standardized tests and building their resumés with internships and assistantships.

I agree with this.

I think a lot of what makes this column on the mark is the absence of risk-taking on the part of "youth."

This, of course, includes myself.

The corollary to that is that the risks are seem, relatively, much higher. Getting a 'good' job with a record is much harder - even if that record is simply a record of radical activism. As well, the legal risks are generally much higher, and with the explosion of local police using police-state tactics, the literal, physical risks are much higher. Finally, I think the assumption that there is either a government-provided social safety net or a safety net of people willing to help a person out is gone. Certainly the social safety itself has been shredded these last two decades.

On the other hand, Martin seems to conflate 'real' or 'radical' activism with 'highly visible and disruptive' activism. They aren't always the same thing, and even though there is a certain value in simply disrupting an unjust system in order to draw attention to it (see also MLK, Rosa Parks, sit-ins, etc), sometimes it's better to fly under the radar.

Remember, for every protest you've seen - from the civil rights era through the current debacle in Iraq - there has been a tremendous, tremendous amount of organizing done behind the scenes. A good protest or march is the expression the members' sentiments as well as the amount of work that's been done - it's not always and end unto itself.

h/t JAO.

It's so obvious that homophobia is built into masculinity, etc. etc.

From a WSJ article:

Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."

"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."

Notice how the logical progression created by the TiVo leads from "gay stuff" to "manly stuff" to fascism?

TiVo must have an advanced degrees in gender studies.

Or perhaps Mr. Iwanyk is thinking like a well-socialized man. Rationality leads to irrational outcomes, or something.

Stereotypical Ambivalence

I find this site funny, but I'm not sure why.

At first glance, it seems I shouldn't.

The one about lefties is pretty frackin' great.

Being Tough

Because everyone knows that men who ask for help are really just pansies:

LEXINGTON, Ky. - A soldier facing his second tour of duty in Iraq said in a jailhouse interview he was at a hospital seeking mental help when he was arrested in the middle of the night for allegedly being absent without leave.

Spc. Justin Faulkner insists his superior officers at Fort Campbell knew about his mental problems but refused to provide adequate treatment.

On Thursday, Faulkner checked into a Lexington VA hospital, where doctors told him they wanted to keep him until Monday for observation. Police showed up at the hospital shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday to take him to jail.

"It's humiliating, degrading," Faulkner, 22, of Stanton, said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press minutes before his release from the Fayette County Detention Center. "It's made me lose respect for the military. To come and arrest me at the VA, it wasn't like I was trying to hide, trying to run. I was getting help. I am being punished for getting help."

Do you get it yet, America? There is no nobility in this. None.

Via Dohiyi Mir.

Reinforcing the Dominant Paradigm, Special Sexism Edition

Because lord knows not a single American was gay before the 1960s...

From another of those blasted books:

A man on the frontier with a family needs a woman, and so, within a year, Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Johnston, who had three children of her own.

This in a chapter supposedly about Abraham Lincoln's early years.

Grr.

Another Story on Oregon Native Mascots

From a friend in Forest Grove:

Athletic Director Wymon Smith is Shoshone Indian.

Assistant Principal Jim Smith’s heritage is linked to the Algonquin, Chippewa and Assiniboine tribes.

Each administrator is proud of his ancestry, and both want to keep the Braves as Banks High School’s mascot.

...

“There’s nothing wrong with Chiefs, Warriors, Indians or Braves,” insisted Jim Smith. “It’s not about names. It’s about how people treat each other. I’m totally in support of keeping things the way they are.”

That's a common argument against changing the mascots: "I'm Native and I say it's OK!"

I have to wonder what the lives of the two men mentioned in the article are like. Are they often visually identified by others as Native American? Were they raised in a traditional fashion, or, frankly, as white people?

In any case, I don't think the "I'm Native and OK with it" argument is a good one. The strongest argument against Native mascots, as far as I can see, is that such mascots maim the dignity of Native people. End of story.

The student body president pulls out another time-tested argument:

“If it were offensive or if it had discriminatory undertones, I’d find it logical,” he said. “But we’re not making (Native Americans) look bad in any way.”

Why does he get to decide? I've been over this what seems like a million times in the last month or so - members of the oppressing class do not get to decide what counts as oppressive or not. At the very least, that's fixing the match. It's also extremely marginalizing.

See also this comment from an '89 Banks High School graduate named Jeremy Larsen (Hey! A local paper that has comments! Imagine that!):

School mascots are about pride, unity and belief in our kids' belief in school and community nothing more. [Italics added]

That same comment has been made quite a bit in the context of the appearance of black facepaint at OSU. It's just as wrong in the one place as the other.

Again, why do people that look and/or sound awfully white always seem to get to determine the parameters of what counts as racist or offensive (or at all)?

It's much harder to acknowledge someone else's pain at some cost to oneself than it is to simply write others' pain off as illegitimate, I know. But it's incredibly important for white folks to do nonetheless.

Subverting Reinforcing the Dominant Paradigm

From a chapter titled "Red Scare" in a book students at work were reading today:

In that same postwar time, there were also some anarchists in America. Anarchists don't believe in government at all. You don't have to be very smart to realize that anarchy doesn't work. But, when the anarchists looked around and saw poverty, war, and evil, they thought that this was the fault of governments. Some may have really believed that the answer was to do away with all governments. A few tried to do that by setting off bombs intended to kill government leaders. That, of course, was criminal behavior. Newspapers made big headlines of the bombs. Many Americans were frightened....

That was the entirety of the chapter's mention of anarchism - except for the blurb on Sacco and Vanzetti, who, according to the book, "may or may not have been guilty."

The book series was A History of the U.S.: War, Peace, and All That Jazz by Joy Hakim. Specifically, it was Book #9, Page 35.

The treatment of communism was almost as silly and just as shallow.

There was no mention of the Progressive or Labor movements at this time, or of the Socialist movement.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, this is an idiotic representation of anarchism.... but that's what reinforcing the dominant paradigm is all about. Not only does the author lump the huge variety of existing anarchisms together, she implies the old "anarchy means chaos" bit by not acknowledging any other form of organization besides the "government" (and without further context or definitions, when written in a history book for high schoolers, that means "American-style government").

Good LTE in the GT

...Ms. Novak basically defends the continued use of these mascots simply because the majority of people feel that there is no problem. For example, she mentions that 15 high school students “identified” as Native American said that they had no problem with Native American nicknames. However, it could be that these students were not willing to confront the entire school of white peers on something very controversial.

The above quote is from a CHS high school student, in a letter printed in the Gazette-Times.

She recognizes the effect of peer pressure and how it's related to the mascot issue.

Good for her.

Civic Journalism

I knew this would come up sooner or later in the context of both the Lebanon situation and the Daily Barometer, so I want to take a second and introduce the idea of civic journalism, also known as public journalism.

Specifically, I was prompted by this comment at LT's blog by Express reporter Larry Coonrod, speaking for himself about the role of journalists:

Our job is to fairly and accurately report the facts surrounding the issue and let our readers make up their own minds.

This is, in a sense, absolutely uncontroversial. It is orthodox to journalism. It's an idea that has, in no small amount, defined an era of journalism, from roughly WWII onward. Implicit in this comment is a belief in the ability of journalists to be neutral.

That idea also happens to be problematic. The world has changed significantly in that time, as has humankind's understanding of ourselves and our societies. That idea, however, has not changed.

I am thinking of Howard Zinn's book (and DVD) You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

The world today is a moving train. No question about that.

As I wrote about the Barometer situation:

Journalists, like everyone else, bring to work with them the sum of their experiences and their values – and are therefore not the neutral or objective actors that ancient media theory hold them to be.

This, of course, holds just as true for the Lebanon Express and Albany Democrat-Herald as it does for the Barometer.

No one can completely remove themselves and their values from their work. Every decision made about what to cover, and how, and who to ask for quotes, and where to do research - all of those reflect in some sense both professional values and personal values.

If journalists are no longer the neutral, objective actors they used to be, if they must take a position, then what position should they take?

Enter Civic Journalism:

The civic journalism movement (also known as public journalism) is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants. With a small, but growing following, civic journalism has become as much of an ideology as it is a practice.

I actually think that the DH and also the Corvallis Gazette-Times are doing a good job of opening themselves up to the public in some ways (see the community forums of the DH and the 10-part series on Corvallis at the GT). It's harder for a smaller paper like the Lebanon Express to do so, but I'd like to see it nonetheless.

Then there is the Daily Barometer. Of all of the aforementioned newspapers, the Baro needs to be the most responsive to the community, and needs to allow for the most engagement on the part of its readers.

Needless to say, it is not. In fact, I would go so far as to say the Baro is digging its own grave in the long term if it refuses to acknowledge the nature of its own existence and instead pretend it's somehow removed from the community. That position is increasingly untenable.

I understand the desire for editorial independence (though the Barometer does not have it even by their own definition). But opening up the paper's internal workings/production process to readers (and staff!) and increasing community participation does not have to undermine that independence - as long as the integrity of the editorial staff is solid. Right now, of course, the integrity of the editorial staff is under question.

What is the Barometer going to do to (re)gain credibility among its audience?

How is the Express going to envision its own role in the slow-motion meltdown of the Lebanon School Board? How is the community going to view the Express?

Civic Journalism provides good answers to those questions.

Done

Dap has served his purpose.

Too many people know my identity anyway, and I'm tired of not being able to write about whole sections of my life.

So that's over.

My name is Dennis.

Most of you already knew that.

With any luck, not a whole lot will change about this blog.

Carry on.