Order Out of Chaos?

Appeal to people's hope and aspirations

2007-01-04T18:03:00.000-06:00

An Easy Burden
Andy Young, 1996

Young, a principal of GWI Consulting and former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor, describes his development as a community leader.

After serving with the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in 1972 Young was elected to the US House of Representatives.

All politics is local and my campaign was no exception. But I was campaigning in a national political atmostphere that was being poisoned by the politics of fear and division. Throughout the campaign I tried to appeal to people's hope and aspirations rather than their fears. This had always been the challenge in the SCLC's campaigns for social change - to help people grow toward their hopes and aspirations rather than letting a fear of change overwhelm them.

The Root of Wild Madder

2006-10-05T12:40:00.000-05:00

Chasing the history, mystery, and lore of the persian carpet
AP correspondent Brian Murphy describes his exploration, geographic, historical and cultural, of persian carpets.

He is able to have a conversation with a not-yet-married 15-year-old weaver in in Bagdis, in northern Afghanistan:

"How do you see your future?"
"Why do you ask these things?" She shrugged. "God decides, not me."
"But you have some role, don't you?" I pressed.
"Maybe in your country there is planning like this," she replied again, looking me square in the eye. "Here, there isn't."

"Asli", I said. "Do you know that some people think there is something very sacred about carpets - "

"If you mean do I think I am special in God's eye, then no. That is not right," she cut me off, clearly becoming tired of my odd questions. "If you mean do I sometimes sense God while I'm working, then the answer is yes. There are times when I finish a difficult border or gul and must stop just to look at it. It is like a small world all alone and separate: perfect and peaceful. God must be guiding our hands, I think. This is how he gets us to look beyond this world. This is what I feel sometimes."

We Should Never Meet

2006-09-05T12:35:00.000-05:00

A book of interconnected short stories from Aimee Phan about Operation Babylift, which brought orphans, many of them mixed race, to the US from Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Inshallah

2006-08-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

From Oriana Fallaci's 1990 novel Inshallah, set in the last weeks of Italy's participation in the Multinational Peacekeeping Force in Beirut in 1982-3

Then, all at once, the stunning silence that had petrified the quarter broke. And from every street, every alley, every lane, every house, every hovel, every shanty, door, roof, terrace, window, from every hole, a tremenduos chorus arose. A lugubrious chorus of groans and howls and voices that called the dead. The Bashirs, the Ismahils, the Sharifs, the Alis, and the Barakaats killed in Shatila. The Leydas, the Fatimas, the Jamilas, and the Aminas killed beside the Bashirs and Ismahils and Sharifs and Alis and Barakats. And along with that lugubrious chorus, an unusual sound. The inimitable sound that Arab women emit by drumming the tongue against the palate and gurgling a shrill gurgle, a piercing scream made up of infinite screams whose significance changes according to the circumstance, so at times it expresses protest, at times jubiliation, at times grief, and in the last case it is the most unbearable sound you can hear. A sound that seems like a weeping of Cyclopes, a sobbing unuttered by hordes of tortured animals.

Four Freedoms

2006-05-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

from the State of the Union address delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on January 6, 1941

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause. In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into worldterms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the wold.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a
revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

Who Makes the News?

2006-02-16T13:14:00.000-06:00

Global Media Monitoring Project 2005

http://www.whomakesthenews.org

On 16th February 2005 the world's news media came under scrutiny when hundreds of people in over 76 countries monitored the representation and portrayal of women and men in news on television, radio and in newspaper. One year later, groups in over 50 countries launched the results of that incredible effort and challenge the media to ensure that fair gender portrayal becomes a professional criterion like any other such as balance, fairness and honesty which all good journalists should aspire to in their work.

Friendship at a Distance

2006-01-29T09:22:00.000-06:00

Young Caucasus Women is a weblog project which aims to:

highlight the similarities and learn about the differences between young women in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia
promote citizen journalism in developing countries as an alternative to mainstream media.
promote weblogs as a method of democratic expression.
expose young women to journalism and technology.

Join us!

The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians

2006-01-13T10:55:00.000-06:00

"Susan Pace Hamill is a law professor who went to seminary and decided to apply Judeo-Christian ethics to tax policy. Her conclusions caused a political conversion in her state's conservative Republican governor Bob Riley, who proposed far-reaching tax reforms in the state that would relieve tax burdens for the working poor while increasing the tax share of its wealthiest citizens and business interests."

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

2006-01-13T10:40:00.000-06:00

God's Politics
Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
Jim Wallis, 2005

Author Jim Wallis, of Sojourners and Call to Renewal, describes:

I've done literally hundreds of town meetings around the country, and when I get to the subject of poverty, the blaming begins. In the room are usually civic and religious leaders - mayors and city-council members, business executives, educational and law-enforcement officials, pastors and lay church leaders. I often ask who is responsible for the poor children who are falling through the cracks in their community. Immediately, one side says it's the Democrats whose programs have failed, and the other quickly counters that it's the Republicans whose policies have abandoned the poor.

It's very interesting. I ask them who is responsible, and they instead tell me who is to blame. When that's pointed out and I suggest there is more than enough blame for child poverty to go around, I ask who the leaders are in their community. "We are," they finally say. "Then who is responsible?" I ask again. That's when they look at each other and admit that they should be the ones responsible. And that's when we begin to talk about a strategy that might actually work to reduce child poverty, address real community issues like drugs and youth violence, and create safe and stable communities of opportunity and hope.

Shostakovitch 100: Austin Celebrates

2006-01-09T19:13:00.000-06:00

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Austin American-Statesman:
With 2006 marking the 100th anniversary of [Dmitri Shostakovich's] birth, Austin arts organizations have put together the first citywide, yearlong festival celebrating the work of a single artist...

Credit Richard Buckley, Austin Lyric Opera's artistic director, for planting the Shostakovich seed. He's mulled over the idea of a festival almost from the moment he arrived in Austin two years ago... The Shostakovich spirit caught on. Now, nearly every major classical music group in the city is in on the festival, dubbed "Shostakovich 100." ... Even the Cedar Park High School marching band is getting in on the fun. They'll be stepping to several movements from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 at all their football games next fall...

The manner in which Buckley and others put together the "Shostakovich 100" festival is nothing less than a do-it-yourself miracle. With no administrative apparatus, along with voluntary and open participation, the festival required no additional fundraising on anyone's part. The Web site comes pro bono. And as arts groups add Shostakovich-related events to their schedules, they, too, can claim participation in the festival.

I like the concept. It's so simple! It becomes real just by thinking the idea. Each group does what they were going to do anyways, only with Shostakovich, and voila - the sum is more than the parts. But...

... I'm stumped for where to start for myself, as an audience member. Arts organizations are churning out intro material, but it is dancing about architecture - words about Shostakovich, but not Shostakovich.

Every other bit of music I know, any form that says anything about an artist or a culture bigger than itself, took me forever to absorb. Lots of repetition. Lots and lots. (At some point, aren't you supposed to get faster at learning?)

So, starting tonight, Symphony No 1 two-a-days.

The bigger picture, of course, is how (or if) to apply this approach to community "issues" - education, health, etc. Does it only work with art, either because that is just a "nice to have" that no one needs to dig their heels in about, or because it's not a "hard" issue? Is the approach deceptively participatory, because even though a range of groups are involving themselves, they represent only a small part of the whole community?

And what if we really should be dancing about architercture (or about urban planning, or affordable housing)? Does wordiness drive people and groups out of the deliberative process? Does linearity pass right by good but mishapen solutions?

My Georgian Anecdote

2006-01-08T09:39:00.000-06:00

(for the Young Caucasus Women)

I was volunteering with the english-as-a-second-language program at Lanier High School. Basically my job consisted of spending one class period with a pair of students to trick them into communicating in English. (It can be mortifying just to be a teenager: trying to figure out what is going on with your own self, understand that in context with the rest of the world and everyone in it, and figure out how to respond. Imagine adding to that all of a sudden you can't even control the language. So most of these teens' english was much much better than they believed it was. If they were actually interested in the conversation they could forget to worry about all the things that might be wrong.)

I had mentioned one day that most people who live in Austin aren't from here. (Literally. Half the people who are here now weren't here ten years ago.) A Ukrainian student, who tended to be sort of withdrawn, asked where I was from. Without thinking too much, I said "Georgia". All of a sudden his face lights up, he leans forward, blurts out, "My mother is from Georgia!" and launches into an animated monologue about all the things that were different for her in Ukraine.

Now yall from the Caucasus already see how this story ends. But, at the time, I was sitting there trying to keep listening actively to what he was saying, while trying to figure out what the heck went wrong. He was very sure we had communicated, and I was pretty sure we hadn't. Eventually he got to the part about how his parents met, which involved his father's service in the Soviet army, and I finally caught on. It was a little bit of a downer when I had to explain that I didn't actually come from the same place as his mother. But I think he did take away the idea that bobbles in communication aren't necessarily because of your vocabulary. And that grown-ups are as likely to be the source of confusion as teenagers.

(In case you were wondering, the former British colony of Georgia was named for King George II of England. I believe the former Soviet republic is known as Georgia from the Persian for "mountains"?)
(Vaguely to scale)

Most commonly looked-up words, 2005

2006-01-01T09:27:00.000-06:00

From the Meriam-Webster online dictionary

I have to admit, I'm charmed that people use the dictionary. Or maybe relieved - I look words up all the time, but I was thinking that I had an excessive interest in word origins. I'm especially charmed that these are all clearly words which were used frequently last year, in the repetitious flow of 24-hour news and information. Yet people were actually paying enough attention to say to themselves, "I hear that word all the time, but you know, I'm not exactly sure what it means. I think I'll look it up in the dictionary."

Yay, human race! Yay, quest for knowledge!

The third dinner guest

2005-12-04T10:19:00.000-06:00

Which three people, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?

For some time, I had been sure about the first two, George Washington Carver and Barbara Kingsolver. But I was stumped for the third guest.

"Who would you invite to dinner?" isn't exactly the same question as "Who is your hero?". There are some expectations of dinner guests - to show up more or less on time, while the food is hot; to participate (listening and talking) in conversation with the other guests; to eat (or at least more or less politely rearrange on their plate) the food that is offered. Hosts have responsibilities, too: to provide some sort of reasonably edible meal, to gather reasonably compatible people, to respond graciously to any unexpected events. So fitting that third guest into an existing intimate gathering is not trivial (even with neglecting such traditions of dinner guest etiquette such as equal numbers of men and women, and not inviting only one of a married couple).

Today, I realized who the third guest would be: Clarence Jordan.

The menu:
sweet tea
chicken satay with peanut sauce
blackeyed peas
hot buttered corn bread
home made fresh peach ice cream

"The real terrorism in this country is poverty"

2005-09-01T20:53:00.000-05:00

Quoted in the Austin American Statesman.

Rex Castle, president of the Lubbock Red Cross Board and a senior vice president of human resources at Lubbock's State National Bank:

"This [Katrina] has shown me, and it should show us all, that the real terrorism in this country is poverty. This is something we need to keep thinking about. Not just now."

Katrina

2005-08-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

The Motorcycle Song

2005-03-28T09:59:00.000-06:00

http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/motorcycle-arlo.shtml

Arlo Guthrie lyrics are surprisingly effective with intermediate and advanced ESL students. The words are simple enough on their literal meaning and engaging on their "literal" imagery. The students have enough control of the new language to be able to get the joke. And the songs provide a unselfconscious intro into discussion about interesting and important topics such as the role of government in society and individual responsibility for public order.

Diarios de motocicleta (Motorcycle Diaries)

2005-03-27T12:27:00.000-06:00

http://www.motorcyclediariesmovie.com/

It's a nice movie and definitely worth the time to watch. Very lovely scenes and music. But then, read the books! (Alberto Granado's Con el Che por America Latina (With Che Through Latin America), as well as Motorcycle Diaries itself).

Obviously making a movie is harder than it looks. Somehow this one just didn't "make sense" without background information on the trip and on Che's work and philosophical development. The comment I heard over and over was "He seemed like such a nice young man...", tacitly followed with "How did he turn into a communist revolutionary?" Surely offering some insight into this question was the point of the movie?

The best scene, I thought, was the fish market. ("Fish market? What fish market?" I hear you ask.) What an important characteristic for people who want to change the world! Liking "humankind" in the abstract, but also liking, and connecting with, individual people. (What an important characteristic for a doctor!) A genuine unjudging curiosity who they are and what they do.

(Granado's take on the movie, Cuban version; Granado's take on the movie, English version)

The Wind That Swept Mexico

2005-01-05T20:59:00.000-06:00

The History of the Mexican Revolution 1910-1942
text by Anita Brenner
photographs assembled by George R. Leighton

Originally published in 1943, and then reissued without revision in the 1970s. The text is a little breezy for me to find it useful (or enjoyable to read), but the collection of almost 200 photographs is wonderful. It's almost sufficient to look at the pictures and read the captions.

Starting in 1910, with a formal portrait of Porfirio Diaz, looking quite Kaiser-like, they include everyday street scenes, from cities and towns throughout the country. They feature a few of the famous revolutionary photos, such as Villa and Zapata in the presidential chair in Mexico City, and plenty of faces of ordinary people.

I don't really have a reflection for this one, rather a report on what I learned (which may reflect on how we teach history, I suppose). Traditionally, the years of the "active" revolution are given as 1910-1917, the time of heavy violence. In 1910, the government was led by Diaz practically as monarch; in 1917 Carranza was inaugurated and the Constitution written. The social revolution, redistribution of land (and power), is generally given to have burst back into activity in 1938, when Cardenas appropriated foreign oil fields.

How did that happen? Where did Cardenas come from? Why all of a sudden, well into a global depression, this reversion to land reform and reclamation of Mexico's patrimony?

Having been through two university courses on Mexican history, plus my own best reading from the public library, I had spent sort of a while trying to work out a plausible theory. (I spent really a while trying to find a common intellectual precursor with Roosevelt's New Deal policies.) Nothing.

Then this photo of "A young Lázaro Cárdenas during the Revolution". Duh! Do the math! When else would he have developed, and seen implemented, such a set of values?

And a true road anecdote

2005-01-04T10:08:00.000-06:00

(from Dr. Lynn Warner, Dyersburg, Tennessee)

Dr. Warner and his wife were travelling back from the Gulf Coast, through Mississippi to Tennessee, on two-laned paved blacktop, through the open delta and through the bottomland hardwood forests of the northern part of the state. It was dark, and it was raining. Every now and then the headlights would flash on the eyes of a deer or fox off to the side of the road, but other than that, there was nothing but the rain and the dark.

They were trying to push along the curvy road, wanting to get on home but not wanting to drop off onto a muddy shoulder and get stuck. They came up a little hill and rounded the curve and saw an orange diamond-shaped temporary road hazard sign: "Death Ahead".

Despite that threat/warning, they continued on their journey. A few more curves, and they came to a section of road with several cars parked along the shoulder, and people in their slickers trudging up to a small house set in a clearing. A state trooper was directing traffic. Turns out that someone had died, and the laying out was at home. The sign was just meant to warn of pedestrians and congestions.

Another opening road scene

2005-01-03T09:51:00.000-06:00

All The King's Men
Robert Penn Warren, 1946

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shiny against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her back on but you can't because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you'll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won't make it, of course. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he'll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent throbbing blue of the sky, and he'll say ""Lawd God, hits a-nudder one done done hit!" And the next nigger down the next row, he'll say "Lawd God," and the first nigger will giggle, and the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the sun like a heliograph. Then a few days later the boys from the Highway Deepartment will mark the spot with a little metal square on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt off the shoulder, the metal square painted white and on it in black a skull and crossbones. Later on love vine will climb up it, out of the weeds.

Déjà vu all over again?

2005-01-02T21:08:00.000-06:00

Shooting the Moon
The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever
2001, by David Harris.

Harris seems to particularly enjoy quoting law enforcement officials saying the f-word, and is a little shaky on some obvious facts (like highway names), which suggests he may be shaky on some less obvious ones. But I am supposed to be reflecting rather than reviewing...

(Although Harris has a strong first paragraph:
One of a kind, this story begins at its end, in the here and now of Miami, where the afternoon rain sizzles off the pavement and cruise ships dock for weekends on Biscayne Bay, flags limp, smothered in warmth on all but the very worst of days, the air heavy with the breath of swamps long since paved over; Miami, jumping-off point for America's hemispheric underbelly, where all directions point south, the evenings end with breakfast, and the fast lane runs bumper-to-bumper from the beach to the jungle and back; Miami, no holds barred, where if it weren't for "under the table", there would be no table at all; Miami, nose open and packing heat, where twenty-dollar bills are moved around town by the suitcaseful and almost anything goes as far as it is able and not much farther.
Cue Miami Vice music.)

The book is about Manuel Noriega, deposed Panamanian strongman. Remember those crazy 80s when the CIA financed itself with dope runs, leasing the planes for money laundering between trips? La Guerra, in Central American terms. Arms for hostages, Iran-contra-gate, crazy like a fox Bill Casey, and that poster boy for national service and close shaving, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

Not to be glib! People suffered, suffered horribly and died, by the tens of thousands across the region. And people of faith and people of strong values thoughtfully and prayerfully made hard choices about whether to preserve their moral purity and sacrifice their society’s future.

But there was money and power and secrecy that may not have been used for good. Which caused me to reflect on recent US intelligence reforms, including the creation of a truly "central" agency function. Sure, it sounds more efficient. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be more effective - no more duplication of effort, no more intelligence dropped in the cracks, no missed connections due to inter-agency barriers. In a less perfect world, we've lost checks and balances, independent opinions from independent agencies.

Especially since recent intelligence "failures" seem more related to lack of Arabic speakers than to lack of intelligence or of skilled analysts, I'm not sure we made a good trade.

Why does Rice play Texas?

2004-12-09T21:25:00.000-06:00

Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort
President John F. Kennedy
September 12, 1962

I recently had the occaision to read several essays by high school students responding to this speech. (This is the one that features, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.")

I don't think I had ever read (or heard) it before. I've heard folks say "Why does Rice play Texas?" but I always took that at its obvious meaning, with no idea that it was a rhetorical reference.

Were we really ever that young? Were we really ever that sure that technology could solve human problems? Did we even have the faintest idea what a hard problem was? Would the pure and steadfast quest for knowledge simply clear our shining way through the sticky worldly complications of prejudice, ignorance, greed, scarcity?

It's quite the contrast to the War on Poverty that Lyndon Johnson would declare a year and a half later. Now that's choosing something hard!

This time of year, all the columnists and pundits and journalists are putting together their various lists of the top ten stories of the year. Almost an unmitigated flow of misery, natural and human: Bam earthquake, a record hurricane season, Abu Ghraib, the Madrid train bombing, the Beslan school bombing, genocide in Sudan, war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war in Palestine, war in Haiti, ... and tucked down toward the bottom of the list, those little robot geologist cuties, the Mars rovers. Made me smile...