Regarding: Borges, Labyrnith: “Pierre Menard...;” “The Circular Ruins;” “Funes the Memorius;” “The Shape of the Sword”

Labyrnith by Jorge Luis Borges: the short stories “Pierre Menard...;” “The Circular Ruins;” “Funes the Memorius;” “The Shape of the Sword”

Does Borges seek to elicit a profoundly different response in us, his readers, to his various stories? It seems to me that none of us are really capable of telling but one story, singing one song, reciting one poem with a wide variety of names and places and inconsequential details, and Borges is really no different from any of us in this regard. I don’t yet know, but at least, after comparing and contrasting today’s reading, we’ll, perhaps, have a better idea, so let us examine the following four short-short stories and see what there is to see.

In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Borges posits an author who responds to Miguel Cervantes’ 17th Century classic by rewriting, word for word, that very book. The pivot point here is that Menard is not a copyist, he intends to rewrite Don Quixote by becoming Miguel Cervantes, by knowing now all that Miguel Cervantes knew then, but in today’s world, and thus, due to the critical passage of time, the dawning of a new era, the act of existing as Miguel Cervantes in the modern era will make the exact words written then more powerful, more compelling, more elegant, more meaningful today. Underlying this conceit is the real difference in context. Today’s readers are not the readers Cervantes wrote for, and a Miguel Cervantes writing exactly the same words in this time would necessarily mean something quintessentially different. Thus Borges is forcing the sensitive reader to acknowledge that the perceptions we make and share are unique to our experience and, in essence, untranslatably unique. Similarly the reader may come to acknowledge the criticality of the reader, that the manner in which meaning is created is unique for every reader of every text, that, to paraphrase Borges, each reader erroneously attributes anachronistic meaning to the text they encounter and negotiate.

In “The Circular Ruin,” Borges creates a dream world where a mythic creature, perhaps a man, perhaps the dream itself, or perhaps some form of gendered energy, carefully and deliberately constructs the world of man. “He wanted to dream a man,” the reader is told, to “interpolate him into the world of reality.” In this tale the reader comes to understand that endeavoring to dream the man is arduous and unsuccessful until the protagonist abandons his attempts to dream the man, and then, “almost at once” he dreams “of a beating heart.” Minutely, thereafter, the dreamer slowly crafts the man, and the man, metonymically, the world, in a fashion quite similar to how consensual understanding, or meaning, is created in this world — a laborious and accretive process. This understanding, perhaps the fiery, passionate sense of self we all share, is the fire and “fire was the only one that knew his son was a phantom.” Could Borges be saying that knowledge, meaning, experience are all illusory, that these shared “experiences” are no more then the dreams of the consciousness we singularly tap into and eventually, inevitably withdraw from? Ending, not dissimilarly from “Menard,” we are told: “he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”

Again, diving into the meanings of Borges, let us examine “Funes the Memorious,” where the mysterious and ethereal subject, “Ireneo Funes” — Ireneo inferring peace or perhaps peace between men, consequently linked to Funes, possibly a stand-in for Funesto, meaning mortal or fatal — is the main topic of this tale, despite that the author, Borges, introduced within the text, has only briefly and rarely met him: “I never saw him more than three times.” Their first meeting, which Borges recalls clearly, was no meeting for it was just a viewing as the child, Funes, leapt distantly and precariously overhead “in March or Feburary of the year 1884.” Subsequently, after Funes suffered what would typically be known as a catastrophic injury, Borges lent the paralyzed, uneducated, impoverished child a copy of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, and a Latin dictionary, enough to allow the representative savant access to all of the natural world’s knowledge. Funes was tortured or blessed with the ability to recall, in precise and exacting detail, every experience he’d ever had previous to his injury. Before, like all of us, Funes “lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.” When he awoke from his injury “the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant memories.”

The injured man lives more richly, more completely in the minutia of his past and present than the rest of us live at our most sensory enabled. Funes subsequently goes on to create a vast and intricate system of signs, of signifiers and signified, of semiotics, that acknowledge, that deeply and profoundly see how incredibly (beyond the credible) unique every experience, every object, every sensation actually is if we chose to experience the infinite world we exist within. Funes moves beyond human experience into the totality, the global and universal experience, recognizing both the connections and the discrete aspects of each element of our shared experience. He lives more completely by being withdrawn than the rest of us live immersed in the world, and in doing so escapes both his disability and the world itself, a world composed of the “tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death.” We are told that no one “has felt the heat and pressure of reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo.” In this sense does not Ireneo escape death? Though death comes for him soon after, he is already immaterial, beyond the grasp of that which can decay. Is this a different story than that which Borges elucidates in “The Circular Ruin,” a creation myth that posits life and awareness as a dream we share? How is this different from “Menard,” where meaning and understanding are posited as infinitely complex and unique, transiting time and space to create a singular moment of incomprehensible complexity?

Lastly, and briefly, let us look to “The Shape of the Sword,” where Borges tells a tale (which also includes the author as a character) that explicitly states that “I am all other men, any man is all men, (even) Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.” One could take this as an oppressive and pessimistic message, for Moon is not a sympathetic character, yet, are we not all cowards at times, but heroes, too, on occasion. Unique as we are, do not we all carry the scars inflicted upon ourselves and upon all others and are these scars no more than the consensual signifiers of our lives and values and loves and hates? “The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite.” We are man, isolate and universal, this hall of mirrors called life simply reflects our shared consensus.

The necessity and pleasure of demiurgic action ...

Regarding three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: "Tlön, Uqbar,Orbis Tertius," & "The Garden of Forking Paths," & "The Zahir."

The necessity and pleasure of demiurgic action outside the hermetic sanctuary of Literature; Or the role of assertion and resistance in the mental construction of a cultural raison d’etre; Or why reality must always yield to the accreted consensus, yet allow and even predict reëxcavation and reinterpretation.

In 1940 Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo edited and published the Antología de la Literatura Fantástica, a collection of fantastic short stories, but the Anglo-American Cyclopedia may not yet exist, even at some point in the still non-existent future known as 1917, or in the illusory location known as New York.
How can we know New York? Does Des Moines presuppose New York, a constructed antithesis to the extravagant ideation of urbanity at its funky, oppressive, darkened and transitoriness? Or are acts of resistance acts of self-creation? In the beginning there was darkness but now there are only the unknowable acts of the intellect, or is it the romantic, emotional pure love found in acts of faith that offers us leads us to knowledge?

Awful explorations and exposures leaving the reader agape. I could describe multiple blind persons attempting to describe the colors of the dawn but I must assume you know my meaning and see my inferences, as otherwise my citations are merely marks on a page.
That said, or written, the object is artifact and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is the object, the romantic, emotional, intellectual, yearning object, not dissimilar to the mysterious vibrating compass, with its quivering blue needle, it is the quivering blue needle that validates the Princess’s yearning for meaningful artifacts with which to express and affirm her place in the physical world.

By the by, although it is unlikely that Borges knew this then, Ezra Buckley did exist, 1803-1874, and the Ezra Buckley Foundation, created for the purpose of destroying history, exists, as a game, here and now, although it is impossible Borges would have known that then or now as Borges, a mercurial being, ceased to operate as a participant of the object plane of this planet—the Orbis Primus, i.e. the physical world, if I may—as of the ephemeral temporal location accepted and acknowledged among some of the cognizanti of Orbis Tertius (earth, not mind) as of June of 14, 1986 but located else-whens by other consciousnesses (see Cervante’s death as compared to Shakespeare’s, for example, or the Chinese versus the Jewish calendar for more examples). “Such (is) the … intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality” (p 16, 1962, New Directions Publishing).

We all come from the border of somewhere but it is not so much the liminal spaces that are important as the missing, what Louis Althusser posits as the lacuna, which defines the true discourse. Once again Borges both writes and evokes/invokes through assertion and resistance, through appeals directly to the conscious mind while simultaneously whispering indirectly to the unconscious mind questions about Literature (with a majuscule) and the more important questions about our derivation of meaning.

In the same way the author offers fragmented narratives and the missing pieces to illuminate the “true” text, Borges constantly eludes to the creation of meaning by, Ouroboros-like, constantly returning to the text from different, even alien, and always incomplete perspectives. In another tale, Stephan Albert will say everything stated above, using different metaphors and similes to convey similar meaning, a meaning related but one in which the reader/protagonist necessarily will make different choices, or perhaps the same choices, but end up with a different narrative as a result of the abysmal problem of time, which is actually a problem of interpretation as modified through action, even inaction, which inevitably leads to a unique result—one of an infinite number of possibilities, each, like a broken fragment, redefining the same shared experience of what is.

Don’t get lost. We’re already there. Start making sense. They’re all the same narrative…

James Madison’s Majority Nightmare: An engaged, enraged and impoverished rabble.

It may be said that I come to this argument with a personal agenda, especially considering the economic circumstance we find in America in the early 21st Century, so be it. Like most of us, I feel poor by my own standing, but, unlike many, I know that I am rich when compared with so many other Americans. Further I believe that I have experienced the extremes of both opposing sides of the economic spectrum that impacts us all; and in the 60 years I have been on this earth I have seen a wide swath of what is humanly possible. It is in this glaring light that I must judge James Madison’s Federalist 10 and 51 and find these to be too quickly, even premeditatively, reaching for the bottle of power to protect and secure the well-heeled minority over the natural interests of the economically bereft majority.

It is so widely acknowledged and recorded that Madison’s “most distinctive belief was that the new republic needed checks and balances to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority*” that this is noted almost immediately in the Wikipedia entry on James Madison. In Federalist 10 Madison plainly states his concerns about the tyranny of the majority against the minority, referring in paragraph one to “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority,”as though it was the greatest threat facing the new-founded country. Madison perfects his concerns in paragraph seven of Federalist 10: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property,” suggesting that an impoverished hungry country full of unemployed citizens might find the excesses of those who got their money the old fashion way — by inheriting it — hard to bear meekly. I suggest that it is Madison’s fear of potential future acts of government that might redistribute the young nation’s wealth that most motivates his thinking in both Federalist 10 and Federalist 51, but let us look to the texts.

Federalist 51 begins with a question: How should the young country “practice the necessary partition of power?” Madison says this partition is particularly important in assuring that no one segment of the government reign supreme over all the others, for as we know from our class discussions and his reference to the saintly behavior of inhuman angels, pure power is the most addictive of substances for mere mortals and inevitably leads to tyranny. Madison answers his initial question in paragraph four of Federalist 51 with the observation that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Note that it is not the Creator nor morality nor compassion nor Christian charity that might mediate the human lust for power and wealth, but that by pitting the hunger of one ferocious dog against the next, the general populace might be saved from the most wretched of avaricious impulses by its individual governing citizens. In paragraph nine he again reaffirms his concerns about dangers of majority rule by first briefly acknowledging the risks of oppression by the ‘rulers,’ which is offered in contrast to the premier importance of guarding “one part of the society against the injustice of the other part” — as though the tyranny of the elite was not either of those ‘parts.’ It almost seems as if Madison’s ideal of democratic rule is a dream almost beyond his ability to surrender to the democratic process, which should be ironic in that he is called the “Father of the Constitution.”

Returning to paragraph four Madison recognizes that the first problem of government is granting men the power and authority to govern themselves. He then states that the second problem is getting government to regulate or restrict itself. His solution in paragraph five is to create many, separate, nearly equal departments to vie for this dangerous authority in a policy of supplying “opposite and rival interests,” “where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other.” Again it is only by setting the worst of us in competition with the other worst of us that the average person might avoid being entirely consumed. There is no appeal to our better natures in Madison’s argument, nor are there legal obligations and restrictions, only the recognition of our most selfish impulses. Each self-interested party in governance shall be constrained by the matching self-interest of their competitive parties. Like Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, this system seems to work better in the idealization of daydreams and coffeehouse conversations than in the dog-eat-dog world where these greedy parties quickly realize that by either ‘horse-trading’ or selective ‘blindness,’ each of them can get all them want and more, so long as no one upsets the status quo by reining in his opposite too vigorously. In fact, by codifying this specific individual self-interest into the institutional framework of government, doesn’t this encourage the most selfish and self-interested of behaviors and ensure us that predominantly only the worst of us will fight hard enough to win a seat at the public table of governance, and only so that those who rise to such heights of hypocrisy will be giving access to the trough of bottomless cash? Doesn’t this create an entire governmental culture of greed and narrow self-interest rather than empathetic and noble compassion for all the citizens of this union? There are other compunctions used by humans throughout history to moderate their worst behaviors, religion offers entire tomes dedicated to elevating man’s baser instincts to a higher plane.

Madison’s next several paragraphs are devoted to further elucidating the particular branches of government, both state and federal, and each branch’s natural strengths and weaknesses, with suggestions as to how best to keep each branch and office at parity with its several mates. In paragraph nine Madison states the obvious, that ‘Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens,” by which it is reasonable to suggest that he is again referring to the disparity of wealth, especially inherited wealth, already endemic to the new born country. His first solution is to create a “hereditary or self-appointed authority.” I assume by this Madison is referring to something like the English House of Lords (or more and more like both of our two houses of government where hereditary office seems to be more the rule than the exception). He dismisses this idea without detail. His second solution is to suggest a society “broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” It has been our misfortune to have seen over the last 250 years that the rights of the minority, if that minority was not wealthy and powerful, were rarely protected from the abuses of the majority under such a system as Madison devised, just as it has been our misfortune to have witnessed that a wealthy and powerful minority has continually coalesced both wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands over the ensuing years.

Madison then looks into the hazy future in the balance of the final paragraph, still paragraph nine, to see a vast and diverse America where our great numbers and varieties of peoples is our salvation. Or as Madison states “the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.” It would be wonderfully interesting sit down with James Madison today, 250 years later, and hear what he has to say about this system of governance he worked out. My suspicion is that it worked out very much like he expected it would.


*from Wikipedia, referencing Madison Debates in Convention - Tuesday June 26, 1787: “There will be particularly the distinction of rich & poor. … In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former.” …and Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, June 26th: “The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time … when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small … will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections … if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. The checks and balances ought to be so constituted as to protect the [privatized property of the] minority of the opulent against the [will of the] majority.”


Cited
Madison, James. “The Federalist Papers, The Federalist No. 10.” Thomas: Library of Congress. unknown. Web. April 13, 2011 Wikipedia. “James Madison.” April 13, 2011. Web. April 13, 2011 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison>
Fred Dodsworth, April 13, 2011

It’s Not Just A Fairy Tale: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in The Company of Wolves.

Fred Dodsworth
May 15, 2012

Folk tales, a combination of campfire story and literature, perhaps as old as human language, are, arguably, one of the first forms of popular culture; and as such intrinsically linked to our depiction of and identification of self and culture. Central to the telling of folk tales are questions of agency, power, knowledge, gender, and sexuality. Today it is granted that these issues are social constructs, to use Michel Foucault’s ideas, part of the discourse that defines our world. To determine the meaning and to locate the context of the discourse, especially, embedded narratives and unequal hegemonic power distribution, one needs knowledge of some of the tools cultural scientists have created in the last 100 years. Combining the literary theories of the post-feminist theoretician Rita Felski with those of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (looking at the signified and the signifier as building components for signs of meaning), Roland Barthe (for semiology: the way in which signs are used to create false ideologies and how to evaluate codes for meaning base on their subject location, historical context, and the cultural values of the author and reader) and Louis Althusser’s Problematic, which notes that which is obvious in its absence, in conjunction with Michel Foucault’s concepts about the ways in which discourse creates meaning, I intend to compare ancient and modern versions of the Little Red Riding Hood tale.

When Charles Perrault collected eleven such folk tales, and published them as Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories of Times Past) in France in the late 17^th Century, he created the genre we know as fairy tales. But Perrault’s tales were hardly the first nor final word, and as such they differ from earlier and later iterations as his culture did. Perrault, erudite, male, and one of the founding members of the Académie Française, structured his stories to reflect “the mutual interests of a bourgeois-aristocratic elite” (Zipes 11), especially regarding their daughters, who were bartered for economic benefit. In contemporary times, Angela Carter’s “In the Company of Wolves” re-envisioned Red Riding Hood with a frank expression of sexuality and female self-agency reflecting modern social values responsive to second-wave-feminism. The lens of post-structuralism allows the modern investigator to decouple concepts of innate gender, of essentialism, from the story, to examine how modern iterations of the story reflect new ideas about gender, sexuality, and power.

Historically women have been bound by the constraints of unmediated reproduction and their roles deliberately and consciously constrained by the dominant elite to contain them (and their reproductive capacity) within proscribed social bounds. As reproduction came under the control of women, their behaviors, ideas, depictions, narratives, motivations and opportunities changed, and the female authors, especially, had the opportunity to revisit those powerful influential texts .

Little Red Riding Hood is one of the most widely known of the fairy tales, read around the world and translated into the major languages¹. While Perrault often gets credit as father of this tale, it existed long before Le petit chaperon rouge was published in 1697^2&3. In earlier versions the young woman was not naïve: “The ‘peasant girl’ is forthright, brave and shrewd. She knows how to use her wits to escape preying beasts” Jack Zipes informs the reader in The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (9). Cannibalism, scatological humor and sexual acts were embedded in the ur-story as reconstructed by Paul Delarue in 1885, which celebrated a young girl’s maturation into womanhood (Zipes 5). Perrault sanitized this tale and turned it into a morality play, to teach young females the forest (a metaphor for the French Court in his version⁴) was dangerous, and wolves (a metaphor for rapacious men of the Court and their voracious sexual appetites⁵) would destroy them. In Perrault’s version both Granny and child perish while the wolf escapes (Tater 13). He couples his narrative with an explicit warning, a “Moral”, to convince girls that their sexuality has fatal consequences. In the Grimm Brothers’ version, published a few decades later in Germany, the wolf devours Little Red Cap and Granny, but a masculine savior rescues them intact from inside the beast! (Tater 16), reaffirming the protective supremacy of men and re-stipulating the vulnerability of women. Many noted authors have rewritten this tale, not all reflect on Red Riding as a metaphor for the status of women; nor certainly are all the tales invested with the specific authorial subjectivity that a woman author brings to Red Riding Hood’s ambiguous representation. Referring to the work of Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey states the symbolism and imagery which allow a reader to make connections is arbitrary: “the relationship between the two is simply the result of convention — of cultural agreement” (111). A sophisticated author can layer alternative suggestive meanings into her tale and a critical reader should assume modern authors do not intend the conventional metaphoric connections. This is especially important when examining the work of women writers: “The true meaning of women’s writing lies beneath the surface, in covert messages and submerged clues. Because this meaning is socially unacceptable and even subversive, it is buried deep within the text” Rita Felski states in Literature After Feminism (69). When a female author recreates Little Red Riding Hood, she does so with a sense of her time and place and an awareness of the oppressive history of women’s experience of social authority over their sexuality, and the heavy price paid by women who ignore the dominant cultural imperative. While Perrault’s goal was to “civilize” girls into complacent and accommodating members of 17^th and 18^th Century French society, authors such as Angela Carter, Anne Sexton or Carol Ann Duffy have a different agenda.

“In the Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter, published in the United Kingdom in 1979, was a short story in The Bloody Chamber, her book of updated fairy tales (published in the U.S. in 1980). It was subsequently turned into a BBC radio-play in 1980, and a film by auteur Neil Jordan in 1984. It is a staple of college-level literature and gender-studies programs. Carter used her version to offer ambiguous perspectives on gender, sexuality and self-agency. She positions feminine sexuality as an important but underrepresented source of innate power, symbolized by the werewolf. While the wolf and its lycanthropic manifestation are typically interpreted as masculine, Carter flips this and uses the symbol to connote overt, feral, female sexuality.

Carter crafts her tale in three sections, each constructed to lead the reader to understand her use of the wolf/werewolf as a symbolic, transformative figure signifying female desire. As the tale begins Carter informs the reader: “The wolf is carnivore incarnate. He’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh than nothing else will do” (110). The author returns twice more to this motif before her story ends. Additionally by double stressing the root syllable “carn,” from the Latin “carnis⁷,” Carter encourages the reader to polysemically associate the inferred word “carnal,” with the wolf. She reinforces this subliminal association by describing the wolf as “cunning,” homophonically suggesting Latin “cunnus⁸,” for female genitalia, and then heightens the association: “once he’s had a taste of flesh, than nothing else will do” (ibid.). Carter continues like this for six paragraphs with direct and indirect references to sexuality: “the light from your lantern will reflect back on you — red for danger” (ibid.), red light, the signifier, overt sexuality the signified, the denotation that one’s own carnal desires are reflected; “…then he knows he must run” (111), note the pronoun here is masculine, it is the male who is the fearful prey, not the female; “they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat” (110), inferring olfactory and pheromonal responses to female fertility and identifying the reader as female with the possessive pronoun: “your”; “the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering” (ibid.), this active and on-going experience of killing suggests le petite morte, a euphemism for orgasm. When the author describes the wolf attacking: “Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops” (ibid.), this opulent and salacious description evokes erotic ecstasy as an alternative to death by werewolf. She reminds the reader such hungers do not respond to reason, that even in the sanctity of the home lustful desires are ever evident: “But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them down,” (111). Humorously and anachronistically she adds: “there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni” (ibid.). By these means Carter identifies lust’s thrilling, dangerous demands as contemporary, commonplace and domestic. Of course the inherent ambiguity of metaphor allows a reader to argue a different interpretation: “we need to understand the polysemic nature of signs, that is that they have the potential to signify multiple meanings” (Story 119). It is possible to argue that by these phrases Carter is referring to predatory male sexual threats, even interpreting “he knows he must run” as an un-gendered universal pronoun. But, to paraphrase Roland Barthe: “Which codes are mobilized will largely depend on the triple context of the location of the text, the historical moment, and the cultural formation of the reader” (Story 121). To understand the connotation one must consider the context. Carter, a globally-recognized author⁶ and feminist is not the standard bearer for conventional sexual stereotypes of reluctant, sexually-victimized women. Her work, including the other fairytales in this collection, embraces overt female sexual desire as a right. As she states in Sadian Woman: sexually uninhibited behavior is “part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders” (22). Affirming a more aggressive interpretation Carter concludes this section with a warning: “the wolf may be more than he seems” (“Wolves” 111). Recalling Felski, Carter appears to saying her wolf is not the conventional one.

The short middle section of her story is composed of three brief vignettes intended to show the place of the werewolf in this world. The first vignette features a wolf who “pounced on a girl” (ibid.) but was chased away by men with rifles, an example of the rifle as symbol of the phallus being used to protect (and oppress) women.. Then the wolf is tricked, entrapped in a pit, into which the hunter jumps to “slit his throat” (ibid.). After slaying the creature the hunter discovers no wolf, only “the bloody trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead” (ibid.). Extending the metaphor of werewolf as female desire, it is possible to interpret this as an example of man’s fear of woman’s carnal appetite. The hunter does not shoot the wolf from the safety of the edge of the pit but jumps into the pit, both to make intimate contact and to destroy the beast. Jumping into the pit, the hunter imagistically enters the vagina (a synecdoche for female desire) where he delivers a deadly, bloody slash to the beast’s throat and removes the wolf’s head and feet. Symbolically, the bloody slit reminds the reader of women’s reproductive role, evoking the imagery of menses and its mysterious (to too many men) place in human regeneration; and by removing the beast’s head the hunter (as man) destroys the both wolf’s identity and self-determination. If the wolf represents womanly desire and lust, this denies women the opportunity to practice their sexuality. By cutting off the beast’s feet, the wolf (as woman) is prohibited release (sexual freedom and freedom of movement), thus woman’s foundational autonomy is undermined. While this may be interpreted as trapping/constraining female sexual expression in a manner similar to Perrault’s tale, Carter suggests that doing so annihilates female sexual expression “dying, dead.” In the second vignette, a wedding party is transformed into miserable werewolves because the groom defied the wishes of a female witch. The wedding party stands as the symbol of sacred human connection, especially in its regenerative, sexual manifestation, and the misery of the werewolves again indicates desire without release. The groom —a man —is to blame for the suffering of all due to his selfish choice. The third and final vignette is a short-short story that returns one of ur-tale’s missing elements, the scatological reference lost when Perrault sanitized it into a literary artifact. Now a new-husband disappears on the wedding night before the new bride has the opportunity to experience socially condoned sexuality. She mourns her loss in the culturally proscribed fashion, then settles for another man and bears him children. Years later her first love, symbolizing long lost desire, returns, a werewolf. The lycanthrope abuses her, calls her a whore, and attempts to destroy her family. The creature is killed and revealed to be the beautiful being she once loved, symbolically representing lost lust. She weeps for her loss, which results in her getting beaten. In each of these vignettes, by viewing the lycanthrope as a metaphor for female sexual desire, the reader discovers profound and symbolic meaning whereas a straight reading of the text remains obtuse, ambiguous and unresolved.

It is in this light that the reader enters the third and most freighted portion of Carter’s retelling of the tale as a girl’s unambiguously sexualized journey into womanhood. “This strong-minded child insists she will go off through the wood” (113), the narrator informs us, setting the child in opposition to traditional constrictions on female autonomy, stressing her intent to ignore these cultural prohibitions symbolized by the woods. Now the tone of the story is foreboding: This “is the worst time in all the year,” “children do not stay young for long in this savage country… they work hard and grow up wise,” the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow” (ibid.). Similarly Granny loses her saccharine qualities, now she is “a reclusive grandmother so old the burden of her years is crushing her to death” (ibid.). Informing us of Red Riding Hood’s changing sexual status, the narrator states her “breasts have just begun to swell… and she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month” (ibid.). As we read the child transitions into a fertile but virginal woman: “She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane” (113-114). The redundancy of this passage is not the work of a lazy author but the work of an author who intends for her writing to be unpacked. In the “Polemical Preface” to The Sadeian Woman, Carter states: “relationships between the sexes are determined by history and the historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men” (7). After discussing the ways in which men regulate women’s fertility and sexuality, she continues: “The very magical privacy of the bed, the pentacle, may itself only be bought with money” (12). By invoking the “pentacle of her own virginity” in her fairy tale Carter acknowledges the problematic: “According to Althusser… a text is structured as much by what is absent (what is not said) as by what is present (what is said)” (Storey 72). Neglected throughout the “The Company of Wolves” are issues (practices) related to the economic and the political subtexts of the story. This is highlighted when one recalls that Perrault, to please his 17^th Century aristocratic patron, Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance to Louis XIV, “The Sun King” (Orenstein 30), crafted a text which removed all class-related signifiers in the predecessor iteration of the tale (Zipes 2) and his “morals” were informed by the economic benefit his patrons received when they sold off their daughters to highest bidders in state-sanctioned mariages de raison, “marriages of convenience.” Whether the narrative is located three hundred years ago or the late 20th Century, Carter maintains women depend upon men for their economic well-being and men value women for their sexuality. Carter wants us to understand that as a virgin Red Riding Hood’s worth was at the apex of the pentacle of her value to the parental estate, which is what Perrault espoused and valued in Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. “Virginity was a requirement of the mariage de raison in the French Court” (Orenstein 36). Such marriages were political and economic pacts managed by parents for their personal gain, not acts of romance.

But Carter’s woman-child, with her incipient sexuality, is neither naïve nor sequestered. Carter’s Red Riding Hood makes her own sexual choices. When she encounters the “very handsome young one,” unlike the “rustic clowns of her native village … soon they were laughing and joking like old friends” (“Wolves” 114). Comparing the stranger to the pool of undesirable mates she knows, Red Riding Hood chooses the stranger. When he tells her “his rifle would protect them” (ibid.), she surrenders her knife to the potent promise of his phallic weapon. There was neither knife nor rifle in Delarue’s ur-tale or Perrault’s version, thus Carter allows the reader to invest these symbols with meaning, and she makes that meaning obvious when the werewolf asks Red Riding Hood to wager. “What would you like? she asked disingenuously. … Commonplace of a rustic seduction; she lowered her eyes and blushed” (115). With this pantomime of femininity Red Riding Hood chooses the beast.

In contradiction to the lustful negotiations between the virgin and the beast, Granny symbolizes the restraints of a culture in decline. “Aged and frail, granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises … the grandfather clock ticks away her time” (ibid.). Even while still living, she is already dead, withdrawn from the daily intercourse of the social, carnal world. Clutching her Bible, calling on her Christ and his mother, and all the angels in her heaven won’t stop the inevitability of a changing social order (116). Representative of the Ancien Régime, Granny must die to make way for the revolution. In this sense Granny’s death represents the end to historic restrictions on women and the end to Charles Perrault and his misogynistic narrative. “The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed” (ibid.). The lycanthrope, with “His genitals, huge. Ah! huge” (ibid.), sexually and intellectually symbolizes the cycle of renewal and simultaneously is an ironic acknowledgment of Granny’s original nature as a sexual actor. Heralding this explicitly coupling of death and sexuality Carter resurrects the paean she used to introduce her story: “The wolf is carnivore incarnate” (ibid.). Devouring the flesh, embodying the flesh, the beast asserts the triumph of the flesh.

The tale’s dénouement is inevitable. It is neither a chaste story, nor is it a false morality play. Whether Red Riding Hood is devoured by the wolf or not, the reader knows Carter does not intend to chastise the young woman for her sexual impulses. Instead the author uses this opportunity to revisit Delarue’s folk tale reinsert some of the explicit sexuality Perrault excised. When Red Riding Hood recognizes the werewolf in Granny’s bed, she acknowledges “the blood she must spill” (117). Here Carter redirects the signifier: blood, from its historic signified: destruction of the flesh, to create a new oppositional sign; blood resulting from her soon-to-be torn hymen representing sexuality, fertility and the flesh reborn. The old signifier and the new signified unite to create a sign that celebrates carnal rights. Similarly the beasts’ howls, originally terror inducing, are re-contextualized: “(They are) howling as if their hearts would break… poor things” (ibid.), says Red Riding Hood. The wolves suffer, like women suffer, and so they, too, cry at their unfair fate. In an act of self-agency Red Riding Hood removes “her scarlet shawl… the color of sacrifices, the color of her menses, and since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid” (ibid.). Like any number of initiates throughout history, Red Riding Hood simultaneously fears and embraces the imminent change in her life. “What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it anymore” the wolf replies (ibid.). This action is repeated until the young woman is naked. While the reader might think this was a baroque literary element Carter added to sexualize her story, the language comes verbatim from Delarue’s ur-tale. Similarly, in both tales Red Riding Hood willing climbs into the wolf’s bed where “she freely gave him the kiss she owed him” (118), and is initiated into her fully sexual self. “Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him” (ibid.), like the chorus of a song, Carter uses this phrase to reaffirm the essential carnality of the human condition. In the historic tale, after her sexual awakening, Red Riding Hood escapes by going outside to defecate and then running away. In Carter’s retelling, she needs no such subterfuge, with full self-agency and full awareness she has arrived at her journey’s destination: “sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf” (ibid.).

Thus the modern fairy tale can resolve with Red Riding Hood embracing her womanly right to exercise her sexual choices while the real wolf, the avaricious actors of class and sexual domination are dispatched, not through sharp, pointy weapons nor mortal state apparatus, but through a protagonist’s self-agency. Similarly, if we are to accept Felski’s essentialist position, authors like Carter utilize women’s writing style to uproot the oppressive texts of folk tales used historically to limit gender and class options, and such authors expand both the options and the tools we have to argue new meaning when confronting the hegemonic authority of the elite. To access the deeper meanings Felski tells us are embedded in the text, one can use the ideas of Saussure to look at ambiguity for meanings in the signifiers and signified authors chose to use. A werewolf need not only represent oppressive male sexual domination. If the reader looks closely enough it can represent a woman’s innate sexuality instead. With these tools a reader can again reevaluate the signs in the text to find both the denoted and the connoted meanings, ad infinitum. To see the class issues fairy tales have deliberately glossed over, concepts like Althusser’s problematic give us the necessary lens to reexamine what’s missing. When the actions of a character in a tale seem to veer into sexual parody, Judith Butler reminds us that all of this is a masquerade, that gender is a social construct rather than a predetermined and inflexible fact, and when we wonder what it is that we are, Foucault reminds us that in the act of asking we are still changing and redefining the answers to these questions. It is even possible, as we confront sexual, gender, class and racial stereotypes as the social constructs they are that a new literature, a new manifestation of popular culture can evolve that no longer depends on disparaging and objectifying others to elevate one’s spirits. Perhaps someday all readers, male and female, will discover Eros without the limitations of sexuality or gender, without destructive power dynamics. One can dream.

Notes
1 “‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is told on every continent, in every major language” (Orenstein 3)
2 “In the eleventh century, the scholar Egbert de Liège published the tale La petitie fille épargnée par les louveteaux [The Little Girl Spared By The Wolf Cubs], which presents the central and indispensable event of Little Red Riding Hood” (Velay-Vallantin 310)
3 “Sources: From Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Tales of times past with morals), also called Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye( Mother Goose tales), published by Claude Barbin, 1697” (Orenstein 20)
4 “Perrault’s audience would have readily recognized he setting of these tales. Sleeping Beauty passes through a hall of mirrors that is like the famous one at Court. … Cinderella wears dresses that recall Madame de Sévigné’s specific, detailed descriptions of the wardrobe of the King’s official mistress” (Orenstein 34)
5 “Monsieur Le Duc d’Orleans, the King’s bisexual brother, was so promiscuous that, according to one author, every Roman Catholic royal family of Europe can claim him among its ancestors” (Orenstein 24)
6 Carter ranks tenth on the UK Times list “The 50 greatest British Writers since 1945” 5 January 2008. The Times. Retrieved 10 May, 2012. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/article/2452094
7 "carnis." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 09 May. 2012. < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=carnal>.
8 "cunnilingus." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 09 May. 2012. .


Works Cited
Bacchielega, Cristina. 1997, “Not Re(a)d Once and For All” in Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. pp 50-70. Print.

Carter, Angela. 1993 (1979). “The Company of Wolves,” in The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin Books. Pp 110-118. Print.

Carter, Angela. 2012 (1979). “Polemical Preface: Pornography in the service of women,” in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago Press. Pp 3-42. Print.

Felski, Rita. Literature after Feminism. Chicago. University Of Chicago Press 2003. Print.

Harries, Elizabeth W. Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print.

Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of the Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Print.

Storey, John. 2009. “What Is Popular Culture?,” “Discourse and power: Michael Foucault,” “Orientalism,” and “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. (Fifth Edition). Harlow, England: Pearson Education, Limited, Pp. 1-11, 101-103, 171-178, 111-134. Print.

Tatar, Maria, ed. 1999. “Introduction,” “Introduction: Little Red Riding Hood,” The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: WW Norton, 1999. pp ix-xviii, Print.

Velay-Vallantin, Catherine. 1997. “Little Red Riding Hood as Fairy Tale, Fait-divers, and Children’s Literature: The Invention of Traditional Heritage” in Out of the Woods, ed.. Canepa, Nancy L. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. pp 306-351.

Zipes, Jack. The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. South Hadley MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. 1983. Print.

Thank you, Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 to March 28, 2012)

also A Rich Life at the Boston Phoenix

and Adrienne Rich at Poetry.org

and Living In Sin, an analysis at Tourettesdujour.

What’s so Criminal about Fiona Apple’s Award-winning Music & Video

Fiona Apple’s 1997 song “Criminal,” from her premiere album Tidal, is the biggest hit of her career so far, winning the Best Female Rock Performance Grammy Award at the 40th Grammy’s and peaking at #4 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks. The video version of the song, directed by big screen auteur Mark Romanek, won the 1998 MTV’s Best Cinematography award. Apple described the song as an ambivalent homage to the power of female sexuality. (Wikipeda: “Criminal”) The song begins with the lyrics: “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” While the bad girl theme is not an uncommon motif in popular culture, popular culture products typically treat women as physically, emotionally, and sexually vulnerable. Sexually active women, especially women unfaithful to their male partners, typically are punished in popular entertainment. In this light it can be suggested Apple’s song and video conform to Antonio Gramsci’s ideology of “hegemony,” where “Organic Intellectuals” — pop singers in this case — provide “intellectual and moral leadership” utilized to negotiate a new consensus (Story, 80-81) regarding acceptable forms of sexual expression for women as our culture enters an era where autonomous women represent an ever increasing proportion of the economic and cultural community. The record company, Epic Records, a division of Sony Corporation, the second largest music publisher in the world, profited (obscenely) promoting this discourse while avoiding any threat to unrestricted capitalism, the keystone ideology of the most powerful component of our culture.

It’s worth noting that while this video is transgressive on a number of terms, it maintains substantial obeisance to the traditional male power manifestation of objectification of female body through voyeurism. (Rose, 109) In this case the power is shared as the scopophilic “object” (Apple) exercises scopophilic actions of her own, disrupting the standardized articulation between the viewer and the viewed and calling into question the semiology of the redirected “gaze.” Conventionally Apple objectifies both male and female bodies but more interestingly, Apple objectifies the spectator through aggressive and direct staring, and through the use of mechanisms such as cameras, photographs, and television screens, which serve to remind the viewers that they, too, are being observed. When a video monitor rises mysteriously out of the furniture, Apple’s on the screen, watching the viewer while still-photographs of her, also observing the viewer, emerge from another machine mere inches away. Scopophilia or Panopticon?

The music video opens with the pop singer pointing her camera directly at the viewer and taking a photograph. Her body is off-screen and her face is obscured by the camera, then the screen is momentarily white-washed by the singer’s camera flash. Thus, before we’ve had a chance to voyeuristically examine her, she has aggressively breached the invisible wall between viewer and viewed, making a “permanent” document which undermines the viewer’s sense of anonymity — in the first two seconds of the video. After visually panning over isolated consumer objects in an unidentified, middle-class domestile for several seconds, the singer reappears and takes a second flash photograph of the viewer! Apple is still completely obscured from our view, frustrating our sense of control over her as a scopophilic subject. After additional pans over unidentified consumer products, the singer reappears, camera in hand, no longer obscuring her face, but instead she stares intently, directly, and comfortably at the viewer, again disrupting the articulation between the viewer and the viewed. Immediately thereafter Apple is shown reclining on the ground, clothed but in a sexually suggestive pose entwined with other partially clothed women and the lyrics begin: “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” The singer now sits up, looks directly at the viewer provocatively and confrontationally as her lyrics continue, “I’ve been careless with a delicate man.” This directly confronts the traditional semiology of masculinity by linking it with “delicacy,” a more feminine signifier.

The video continues in this vein delicately dancing between titillating and confronting the heterosexual male viewer. While there are no overt sex acts depicted nor mimed, the heterosexual male and homosexual female viewer see an aggressive young woman who predominantly, but not universally, takes what she wants. It’s worth noting that except for the pop singer, all other male and female bodies in this video have been depersonalized and objectified. Rarely is there even a portion of another person’s face shown, and frequently the viewer only sees small portions of objectified, sexualized bodies. Overtly voyeuristic, this video and the song it illustrates, disrupt the dominant paradigms of man as aggressor and woman as passive recipient. In a bathtub scene, in which male domination is inferred by showing an unidentified man with his feet on the singer’s neck, the text disrupts our expectations with Apple’s loud, powerful, and confident voice: “I know tomorrow brings the consequence at hand, but I keep livin’ this day like the next will never come,” she then responds orgiastically to her partner’s caresses. It’s hard to rationalize this female pop singer as a passive or reluctant under such circumstances.

With all this sexual heat it’s easy to overlook all that the video has neglected, Pierre Macherey suggests that viewing a text as having a single meaning is an “interpretive fallacy.” He states “all texts are ‘decentred’ in the specific sense that they consist of a confrontation between several discourses: explicit, implicit, present and absent” (Storey, 74). “Criminal,” in its adoring and salacious examination of inanimate consumer objects from vacuum cleaners to automobiles from liquor products to fashion attire, fails to negotiate or recognize the ever-diminishing purchasing power of the modern middle-class paycheck. What good is it to want these products if the average person can no longer afford even middle-class “luxuries”? It also fails to acknowledge or address the growing class of women and children living in poverty, the too-typical result of the sorts of steamy adolescent intercourse the film lustily depicts. Systemically, like in every hegemonic interaction funded by the power-class, the film fails to mediate on the profound economic injustice that is destroying the American Dream. The other factor that the video, “Criminal,” references but fails to mediate is the ever-growing problem of our non-existent privacy, of the panoptic nature of modern living. Yes, we enjoy, sexually and otherwise, surreptitiously viewing our neighbor’s bodies but all of us also are constantly on view for other purposes. Without our permission or awareness, the average American is photographed and videotaped hundreds of times a day by cameras installed, “panoptically,” in every part of our environment and those cameras monitor our every moment. “The major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce … a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Storey, 131). “Criminal” seems to tell us that power structure doesn’t care who fucks whom, but it also lets us clearly see that it’s always watching.


SOURCES CITED OR CONSULTED
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies, An Introduction (2nd edition). London, England: Sage Publications Ltd. 2007. Print.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, An Introduction (5th edition). Essex, England: Pearson Education Ltd. 2009. Print.

“Criminal.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 7 Feb, 2012. Web. 12 March, 2012.
“Fiona Apple.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 12 March, 2012. Web. 12 March, 2012.
“Fiona Apple-Criminal.” Mark Romanek. YouTube. 1997. Web. 12 March, 2012.
“Fiona Apple & Mark Romanek: Filming ‘Criminal’.” Mark Romanek. YouTube. 20 May, 2010. Web. 12 March, 2012.

It's way past time to free Leonard Peltier.

Dear President Obama
Perhaps the only Americans America has treated worse then African-Americans are the people who were here first, the Native Americans. The history of institutional violence towards the First Peoples is well documented and continues to this day.

Whether it is the Bureau of Indian Affairs/U.S. Department of the Interior’s continued, deliberate mismanagement of Native owned natural resource rights (see Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s recent rulings in Cobell v. Salazar), the Termination Program instituted during the Presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower (see House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953 and Public Law 28) which resulted in the illegal conversion to private ownership of approximately 1,365,801 acres lands previously held as tribal lands, or hundreds of legislative acts going back to the founding of our great country, the record of abuse suffered by Native Americans by our hands is a national disgrace. Perhaps you didn’t realize, as the person who best represents our great tradition of religious freedom, that Native Peoples were legally prohibited from practicing their religious beliefs until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978! I certainly was unaware of this until recently. Despite the progress our country has made in so many ways, the disgraceful and abusive treatment of America’s First Peoples continues to this day and shames our nation and the principles upon which this nation was established.

It is as a direct result of the illegal Termination Program of 1953 that my appeal comes to you today. The American Indian Movement, much like the several civil rights movements of the 1960s, was founded responsive to the theft of Native rights and lands and the hateful tradition of violence inflicted upon the Native Peoples at the hands of racists and opportunists who valued money and profits over Native lives. In 1975 Leonard Peltier (now Federal Prisoner #89637-1320) answered the call to the people of the American Indian Movement for help and put himself between those who would kill Native Peoples for their lands and natural resources and those whose rights were again being betrayed. Since Mr. Peltier’s trial in1977, evidence continues to come to light in appeal after appeal that directly contradicts that which was presented by the government at the trial where Mr Peltier was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. Even the FBI itself has acknowledged that the Bureau withheld exculpatory evidence; that the rifle linked to Mr. Peltier was not his nor had he ever been associated with that weapon; that the rifle in question was not actually at the scene or used in the crime; that the ‘eye-witness’ who testified against Mr. Peltier — a woman alleged to be Mr. Peltier’s ‘girl-friend’ —had never met Mr. Peltier; and that there was no way for the FBI to prove who fired the shots that killed the agents. Nor has the FBI ever explained why it sent more than 50 agents to the reservation that night, ostensibly to arrest a man who stole a pair of used cowboy boots. In the end the last appeal acknowledged that Mr. Peltier hadn’t killed the agents but stated that his actions “aided and abetted” those who did and thus his sentence was reasonable and appropriate!

Mr. Peltier has already served 34-years for “aiding and abetting.” There are many former prisoners who were actively involved in murder who served less than one eighth of the sentence Mr. Peltier has already served on these trumped up charges! In 2009 Mr. Peltier again came before the United States Parole Commission and he was again denied parole. If he lives so long, Mr. Peltier is allowed to again petition for parole in 2024, at which point he will have served nearly 50 years for a crime everyone acknowledges he didn’t commit. Like Nelson Mandela, Mr. Peltier is no common criminal, but a political prisoner held by a dangerously corrupted system that ignores both the actual evidence and the history of oppression that placed Mr. Peltier and those like him in harm’s way. At this point his, and America’s only hope, is executive clemency. I know that such acts are more typically granted to connected, white, wealthy, powerful people like Scooter Libby and Marc Rich but I’m hoping that you will give some serious thought to undoing some small part of the great damage this country has done to the people who were here first by either pardoning Leonard Peltier or commuting his sentence. I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter. I would be even more appreciative if you took action to right the wrongs suffered by this courageous and heroic American.

How I learned to stop hating Hofmann.

Hans Hofmann’s “Effervescence” 1944, A(n in)Formal Analysis.

Examining Hans Hofmann’s “Effervescence,” a painting he completed in 1944, in the very institution that was built to house this collection of 47 masterworks his wife gave to the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in 1930 and 1931, is an ouroboros exercise — where does the tail of the snake who eats itself end? I selected Hofmann’s piece because I’ve never like Hofmann’s work and I don’t understand why it’s important, especially this work which is given prominence in the exhibit by its dominating location. Perhaps this paper will help me discover his relevance. In that light I also purchased and read Hofmann’s Search for the Real, to better help me understand and respond to this work.

Hofmann’s “Effervescence” is a painting approximately 36 inches wide by 54.5 inches tall utilizing the materials of oil paint, casein, enamel, and India ink applied to a plywood panel. Hung in a room devoted to Hofmann’s work, it is backlit by a floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking a portion of the Berkeley Art Museum’s exterior gardens. The walls and floor and ceiling of the museum are the neutral gray of its concrete building material with no softening modern building design elements or colors. The net effect is not entirely unlike creating a cave or a cavern where the art is meant to be the most prominent element of the landscape, and it is clear that displaying artworks was the most important design criteria for the curators and architects. It should also be noted that this structure has distinct and unique acoustic properties that may play a role in creating a sacred space for the viewing of art. The painting is well illuminated by gallery display lights that are far from the painting and out of sight for the viewer. Neither the painting’s frame nor its surroundings visibly overwhelm or even intrude on the work and there are no readily visible placards identifying the work. Despite that the painting was viewed during a class visit, and that there were at least two different classes visiting the museum that day, the gallery is not crowed and the painting is not obstructed and was easily approached. Even the museum guards kept a respectful distance from the object and the viewer.

The structure of the painting is immediately discernable: Over a thin neutral gray wash which does little to conceal the texture of the surface of the painting, which presumably was coated in gesso, the artist has imposed two large triangles of color. A soft, cool, organic green wash roughly bisects the canvas diagonally from upper right to lower left claiming more than the lower half of the painting. It varies in density and tone allowing multiple brushstokes to build up a color density that gives the work both warmth and intrigue. Similarly a warm flesh- pink color, green’s complement, washes over the image defining a rough triangle in the upper left quadrant of the painting, oppositional to the vegetal-green shape. In both cases the underlying gray brushwork is allowed to show through, especially in those areas surrounding the center image of the painting. The pink and green brushwork is loose and irregular causing the pigments to pile up in some sections creating a texture and density of color that further defines the organic, natural and nature-like qualities of the image’s defining edges. I have the sense that Hofmann was intent on creating a frame within which to constrain the exuberant central image yet to come, and he is noted for saying that the first line placed on a canvas is in fact the fifth line in the composition. He uses his colors, pink and green with added white pigment, to add texture and depth in the major color-fields he has created, and to define a hard pink, slightly curved line at the top of the painting, which encloses the image and forces our eye back down into the composition.

The next application of paint on the image are two large black areas that have a solidity, fluidity and high gloss appearance suggesting the pigment was poured on to rather than brushed on to the panel. In that the Hans Hofmann catalogue states that this image was created using oil paints, enamel paints, casein paints and India ink, it is reasonable to assume that this is black enamel paint, and that after pouring the media onto the panel in a circular glob at the top of the ‘canvas,’ Hofmann manipulated it to create a bubbled derby-looking top shape with a bold black curving line, similar to the brim of a hat. The black line is parallel and in opposition to the previously noted nearby pink line that tops the painting. A second large black structural element appears to have been splotched and blotched into a large roughly rectangular shape that is allowed to drip and run down the vertical surface of the composition, pulled by gravity but restrained by the viscosity of the material in a slow moving barely controlled ooze that actually runs off the lower left edge of the painting in a thin diagonal streak. These two dense black elements dominate the central third of the image and the contrasting color value of the black against the soft pastel pink and green forces a great depth into the image, almost as though the viewer were staring into an abyss. As an aside, the resulting black shapes Hofmann created in “Effervescence” are strikingly similar to ink sketches the artist composed while teaching in California in 1931. This is also suggested in Search for the Real: “In Hofmann’s simplified representations of landscape, such as the drawings (“Island in the Bay, California” and “Trees and Landscapes, California,” both 1931), it is possible to observe shapes which reappear in his later abstract paintings” (pps 16-17). Despite the obvious similarities, the painting “Effervescence” is not specifically identified as such an example.

Reasserting control over the painting’s liquid ‘accidents,’ Hofmann uses the diagonal runaway drip as impetus to create two black slash lines upon the image, both starting on the far right side of the composition. The first, a thick black brush stroke that breaks the painting’s edge, parallel but in the opposite direction of the drip, fights gravity, and rises out of the upper portion of the dominant black rectangular element to pierce the upper right side-edge of the work. The second, a much more tentative gesture, takes a runaway drip and directs it diagonally from the bottom right edge into the center bottom of the composition. The quality of this line is similar to the thin, indistinct quality of the original runaway drip. Tending toward transparency and ending directly in the middle of the work, this insubstantial black line frames the composition at the bottom just as the hard pink line frames the composition at the top. Each line, pink and black, directs our attention back into the image.

At approximately the same time the artist established the painting’s heavy black gravitational foundation, which defines the deepest depth of “Effervescence,” using his brush he developed an ash-blue shadow on top of a portion of the triangular pink area that resembles a large skeleton-key hole shape in the upper left center of the painting. This element is possibly responsive to the upper right black hat-shape. While not exactly complementary colors, the pink and the blue work together to create a sharp vibrational contrast that draws our attention more than one would normally expect. This is the only place in “Effervescence” where Hofmann has used the color blue, and he carefully modeled the shape to give it a texture and substantial solidity that might balance the density of the nearly monolithic, abstract black hole that also demands our focus at the top of the painting. While the bottom of the keyhole shape dissolves into the central image, even in its dissolution it implies a solid, deliberately artist-crafted element, receding yet still balancing the central image. Atop this blue shape and at several intersections of colors throughout the work Hofmann has dribbled an earthy brown pigment that struggles with the black voids in a war for control of our focus. Toward the center of the painting and on the right side of the blue keyhole shape, where the dribbled brown paint intersects the brushed blue shape, this color has created a plane or ‘face’ and a hard right edge which draws the viewer’s focus into the central image and down the canvas. Like blood the loose brown line works further down the painting only to then follow the original runaway black streak diagonally off the lower left edge of the composition. Spiritually, not figuratively, it suggests death’s black hand wrestling in a battle for supremacy with life’s bloody, fecal earthiness. Another dribbled and smudged heavy brown streak vertically bisects the rough black rectangle, cleaving deep up into it, while a third, much lighter and thinner downward dribbling streak, like the third tine on a trident, approaches but does not penetrate the far right edge of the image, constraining the gloom and delicately redirecting our attention back into the painting.

The penultimate layer of the painting is an explosion of thick, glossy liquid white casein splotches, while organic and accidental, clearly also referencing Hofmann’s earlier sketches, but in white this time rather than black. The thorough art history researcher learns from the “Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection of the Online Archive of California” that “‘Effervescence’ consists of pools of pigment poured and dripped onto the canvas with little premeditation.” Further the casual researcher is told: “By welcoming chance effects, Hofmann introduced the aesthetic of controlled accident into his work.” In “Effervescence” it is obvious that Hofmann slopped and poured and pushed around the thick, glossy, brilliant white casein on the surface of his carefully layered composition as an antidote to the gravitational pull of his large dark black voids. Like clotted cream Hofmann freely layered numerous organic globules of this ancient milk-based pigment onto his work creating a perfect, nearly-sterile counterpoint to the organic, natural lushness of the colored elements of the painting while also using the powerful stark white to contrast with the heavy dark black holes he had earlier created. It is with the white elements — one might suggest ‘highlights’ — that the magic of creative transformation occurs. What had previously been simply a process suddenly becomes a “living object.” Like fresh flower buds, two white blossoms, also breast-like, define the center of the painting. Pushing out, up and away from the mass of the central form, these twin white globules both draw our eye’s attention and push our gaze out into either side of the painting. Another small splotch of white casein, higher on the image, establishes a central axis for the composition. These shapes, lacking color, work together to create a strong vertical orientation to the ambiguous central image. While there are several additional small splotches of casein descending on the far right side of the image, the remaining dominant white element is a large, amputated white triangular shape centered in the image that falls off the bottom of the painting. This white shape also works to anchor the composition while reaffirming a white vertical axis for the central image. Attached to the top of this truncated triangular shape is a poured white casein gesture that dribbles diagonally up and to the right into the image encouraging our eye to continually move restlessly around the painting.

Hofmann’s final gestures are delicate black India ink lines, mostly in the white areas at the bottom of the painting, which are deliberately introduced to define texture, volume and direction to his otherwise mostly accidental applications of pigments. These are “the hand of man,” working both visually and symbolically to reassert the artist’s control over the various accidents of process that have created this painting. It must be plainly stated that this work, which resembles but precedes Jackson Pollock’s famous dribble paintings, does not appear to be crafted as a representational image. That said, in the final analysis, all human gestures are symbolic, and all symbols are representational if one has the proper tools with which to interpret the message. Hans Hofmann was 64 years old when “Effervescence” was created and he’d been a studio artist and art instructor for many decades. His “casual” gestures and the “accidents of process” not withstanding, this work is balanced and has a composition that not only references the outer world but demands that the viewer also seek to understand and interpret what may have started out as a series of random processes but inevitably must be resolved into a meaningful image.

Fred Dodsworth © February 23, 2010

Cited
Hofman, Hans, edited by Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hays, Jr. Search for the Real, and other essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts. M.I.T. Press, 1967.
“The Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection.” Online Archive of California. University of California’s Digital Library. Web. February 25, 2011. (http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf2n39n563.)

Food, not Lawns

As humanity treads dully into the second decade of the 21st Century, all the issues we’ve been warned about over and over for the past forty years regarding population growth, food safety and security, and climate change remain unresolved. Despite hundreds of government meetings and proclamations involving most of the nations of the earth, despite thousands of scientific conferences involving tens of thousands of scholars and scientists, despite mass protests and arrests, court cases, conferences and legislation — the planet we live on today is horribly unhealthy, and the people who live on this planet also are becoming horribly unhealthy. The ironic thing is that all these issues rapidly come back one issue — our modern diet. This is an issue we are capable of resolving to a great degree without institutional intervention, through our own action. Americans eat unhealthy food to an unhealthy degree. The economic and institutional policies Americans promulgate for food production are major factors in global poverty, starvation, civil unrest, and environmental degradation. The manufacturing of the food Americans eat is a major component of climate change. Worse, we lead by example and the American example is unsustainable on every level, despite that it is becoming the dominant paradigm. We can no longer wait passively for someone else, for some government agency, or miracle technological advancement to resolve all these issues so we don’t have to “become the change we wish to see in the world” — to quote Mahatma Gandhi.

First let me document what we are doing to our personal health. According to data complied by the Centers for Disease Control released on June 16, 2010 and published in Medscape Today, “obesity and diagnosed cases of diabetes among adults … are at their highest levels since the government began compiling these data.” This study states nearly three of ten Americans over the age of 20 are medically obese, defined as a body mass index of 30 kg/m2 or more, and nearly one in ten American adults have been diagnosed with diabetes. As Eric Schlosser pointed out in the film Food, Inc. this is not a problem of over consumption. Humans are hardwired to crave refined sugar and fats; and modern ‘fast foods’ and ‘processed foods’ are ‘super-sized’ with those ingredients we crave in their most unhealthy forms — mainly from corn and its industrial bi-products. Consuming over-refined industrial food products is not the only way in which our health is compromised by the industrial/corporate food system.

We face long-term health risks directly associated with the production methods used in growing vast quantities of identical industrial food commodities for the mass market. To maximize profits while minimizing expenses requires devoting thousands and thousands of acres of farmland to a limited number of high-profit crops. This practice causes those monocultured crops to strip essential nutrients from the soil and makes those crops unnaturally vulnerable to an ever-evolving array of predators. Replenishing the soil requires massive use of synthetic fertilizers, while protecting these unnatural single crop bio-cultures requires massive use of ever-more toxic pesticides. Despite all the disclaimers issued by government agencies and industrial farmers, the artificial chemicals and deadly pesticides remain within our foodsupply in significant quantities. “The U.S. Centers for Disease reports that one of the main sources of pesticide exposure for U.S. children comes from the food they eat,” (Food Inc. 104) the Organic Consumers Association informs us in “Exposure to Pesticides.” These toxic chemicals have long-term, harmful impacts. “According to the EPA’s ‘Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment,’ children receive fifty percent of their lifetime cancer risks in the first two years of life” and these “standard chemicals are up to ten times more toxic to children than to adults” (Food Inc. 103). Thus to rationalize its profits our industrial food system willingly puts our young children, the most defenseless of us, at the highest health risk. Since in most cases cancer takes decades to manifest, consumers don’t typically see the direct relationship between poisonous food and poisoned bodies. This is not the case with food pathogens where illness and death occur soon after ingestion.

The economies of scales required to provide our nation’s food through a small number of monopolistic manufacturers inevitably makes the manufacturing process the place deadly pathogens enter the food chain. From the CDC website:
In the United States, food-borne diseases have been estimated to cause 6 million to 81 million illnesses and up to 9,000 deaths each year… more than 200 known diseases are transmitted through food … viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins, metals, and prions, and the symptoms … range from mild gastroenteritis to life-threatening neurologic, hepatic, and renal syndromes.”
Because we have encouraged and tolerated the industrialization of our foodways, this has turned that which sustains us into one of the more dangerous risks we face on a daily basis. This is a recent and terrible change to how our food is brought to market. A “few companies have managed, in the last forty years to take over a major segment of American society and are now doing everything they can to maintain and extend that power, including controlling our access to information about their activities” (Food Inc. 38), Robert Kenner tells us in “Exploring the Corporate Power Behind the Way We Eat.” While these multinational corporations do everything in their power to conceal the health dangers in the food we consume on a daily basis, because they operate across national boundaries, because they place profits above health or national security, their business and agricultural practice s put more at risk than our immediate personal health.

The growing global population demands resources, both food and mineral, beyond that which we have been able to produce. At the same time agricultural productivity is being diminished by global warming and depletion of soil resources, and by reduced crop diversity. This is a recipe for resource wars: “The 21st century will be shaped not just by competitive economic growth, but also by potentially disruptive scarcities — depletion of minerals; desertification of land; pollution or overuse of water; weather changes that kill fish and farms,” Thom Shanker warns us in the New York Times. From industrial powerhouses like China to failed states like Somalia, the ever increasing demand for resources inevitably leads to local and international conflict: “[China’s] voracious appetite for minerals has at times set it at odds with the West over policies toward countries like Sudan and Iran, whose oil it buys,” continues Shanker. For most of the last decade the US has rattled its military saber at Iran. Perhaps the biggest factor protecting Iran from the world’s largest, most expensive, and most bellicose military power is that any attack on Iran will be interpreted as an attack on China, a much more dangerous foe. At the other end of the scale, the devastation of Somalia’s natural resources, by industrial-scale foreign fishing operations for example, has opened up new occupational opportunities for Somalia’s former farmers and fisherman, piracy: “Somalian pirates are fishermen who can no longer make a living in waters depleted by overfishing,” Shanker notes. “Meanwhile, arable land and water supplies have been drying up, increasing poverty and driving farmers off the land. These shifts have only fed civil conflict and warlordism.” These examples are “canaries in the coalmine,” current agricultural, business and governmental practices will increase these disturbances as our planet becomes less hospitable to this form of agriculture.

The manner in which we produce food is unhealthy for our planet and plays a major role in global warming and the subsequent human devastation these environmental changes will entail. In “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork,” Anna Lappé informs us:
…the global system for producing and distributing food accounts for roughly one-third of the human caused global warming effect. According to the United Nations’ report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, the livestock sector alone is responsible for eighteen percent of the world’s total global warming effect — more than the emissions produced by every plane, train, and steamer ship on the planet. (Food Inc. 106)
As the news media tell us on a daily basis, global warming is more than a ‘theory,’ it is becoming an ever-present global catastrophe — from an epidemic of wild fires throughout the American west this summer to Category 5 hurricanes drowning New Orleans, from a flooded Panama Canal this week to the nearly 12 million hectares lost each year to desertification every year (according to the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development … and the rate is increasing). These bad industrial agricultural practices cause a myriad of problems “including worsening air quality, depletion of our water resources, pollution of our water resources, and worsening greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s just a partial list” (Food Inc. 93), Robert Bryce informs us in “The Ethanol Scam — Burning Food to Make Motor Fuel.” Clearly the problems are evident and immediate, so what can we do to stop the madness?

Historically citizens looked to the government to protect us from the deadly machinations of large institutions and destructive nations. Unfortunately, our government is inadequate to this task due to its complicity: “This situation is not sustainable, nor is it accidental. … it can be traced back to governmental policies designed to produce the very system that now distorts agricultural production in this country” (Food Inc. 129), Arturo Rodriguez tells us in “Cheap Food: Workers Pay the Price.” Robert Kenner, film director of Food, Inc., agrees, stating that the power of these industrial food corporations is unchecked “thanks to the intimate connections these corporations have with the government” (Food Inc. 36). While there are grassroots organizations working to counter the undue influence of these international corporations, for example as of December 6, 2010, over 150,000 Americans signed a Food Democracy Now! petition demanding the US Justice Department use existing anti-monopoly laws to break up the corporate food megaliths, the need is more immediate and the results are more reliable if we take matters into our own hands. We can “become the change we wish to see in the world,” and the answers are readily available and almost painfully obvious.

As livestock is a major cause of environmental degradation and pestilence in our food supply, simply reducing the amount of meat we eat would reduce obesity, diabetes, our exposure to food pathogens, and global warming! “Choosing to eat less meat, or eliminating meat entirely, is one of the most important personal choices we can make to address climate change, states [Dr. Rajendra] Pachauri [chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]” (Food Inc. 107) in “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork.” Eating less livestock directly translates into less environmental pollution and reduced environment impacst while improving our health options.

By planting a small garden in our yards (or apartment patios and decks) or by joining a local community garden we can reduce not only our exposure to pesticides and food pathogens, we can also reduce the manufacturing and transportation-related carbons created by moving food (on average 1,500 miles) from where it is grown to where it is eaten.

By using a bus or walking to the local farmer’s market to shop for local, sustainably-grown food rather than driving to the not-so-super food emporium we can maintain the small farmer tradition while reducing our ingestion of pesticides and chemicals, reducing our carbon foot print, and reducing our support for an industrialized food system that is killing us.

Supporting small scale, sustainable farms in or near our communities ensures our ‘food security,’ alters the dominant paradigm, and makes for a healthier planet: “organic farming increased biodiversity at ‘every level of the food chain’ from birds and mammals, to flora, all the way down to the bacteria in the soil” (Food Inc. 116) Lappé tells us.

These simple lifestyle choices, which each of us is capable of making without additional expense and without the involvement of the greater community, will directly insure that we are eating less food that is unhealthy for us, that we are eating less food containing dangerous pathogens and chemicals, that we are building a local infrastructure that insures reliable local food access, that creates local jobs, that creates less pollution while improving the livability of our own community and biosphere. All this and you get to smash the dominant paradigm of corporate dominance and industrial solutions to local human problems. And isn’t this the way we would chose to live if we had a choice? We have a choice.


Works Cited

Crane, Mark. “Obesity and Diabetes on the Rise, CDC Survey Finds.” Medscape Today. June 16, 2010. December 8, 2010. Web.

Food Inc. prod. Participant Media. In-class presentation. 2009. Film

International Fund for Agricultural Development. Desertification. August, 2010. December 8, 2010. Web.

Mead, Paul S and Laurence Slutsker, Vance Dietz, Linda F. McCaig, Joseph S. Bresee, Craig Shapiro, Patricia M. Griffin, and Robert V. Tauxe. “Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Newsletter. September 15, 1999. December 8, 2010. Web.

Shanker, Thom. “Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition.” New York Times. December 8, 2010. December 16, 2010. Web

Weber, Karl. Food, Inc: how industrial food is making us sicker, fatter, and poorer — and what you can do about it. New York: Public Affairs, 2009. Print.

Killing Public Education

No Child Gets A Free Education

If the desire to solve educational disparities through legislation like the Leave No Child Behind Act (LNCB) was part of a noble effort offering the children of our nation better educational opportunities to improve their lives, than we would be aspiring to ideals proposed by Thomas Paine and officially instituted when the first taxpayer-funded public school in the United States was authorized by the citizens of Dedham, Massachusetts in 1643. But if the real goal is to end free universal public education and dismantle the system that made it possible, as I believe, than LNCB is just the latest slickly misnamed tool dedicated to destroying one of the founding institutions of our nation. Is this some far-fetched paranoid fantasy? Hardly. United States v. National City Lines Inc tells us that America’s once ubiquitous urban public transit agencies were deliberately acquired and dismantled by private profit-driven corporations under similar circumstances. In that 1949 case, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, General Motors and Mack Trucks, and their agents, were accused and convicted of acquiring and dismantling “46 transportation systems located in 45 cities in 16 states.” Looking at NCLB’s results as detailed in Many Children Left Behind by Deborah Meier, et al, and other sources, and acknowledging the considerable economic and political forces allied against free universal public education as it has existed for almost 300 years, and it seems very much like privatization is the goal, and I’m not the only person claiming this.

Diane Ravitch, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and former Assistant Secretary of Education during President “Papa Doc” Bush’s administration, also tells free universal public education is under assault. “Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education,” Ravitch states in her article “Will Public Education Survive the Embrace of Big Money?” published in Education Week. Ravitch identifies a few of the monied power brokers attacking free universal public education, including the Gates Foundation (MicroSoft), the Broad Foundation (Kaufman & Broad Homes and American International Group), and the Walton Foundation (Wal-Mart). On May 5, 2010, Philanthropy Journal added JP-Morgan-Chase to that list with its $325 million investment in the charter-school business. From the Associated Press we learn in a recent article published in the Deseret News that “Entertainment Properties Inc., known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries, recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for $170 million,” and L. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm behind Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com and Google launched NewSchools Venture Fund ten years ago specifically to fund alternatives to public education. Another of the big players invested in restructuring America’s educational system is Democrats for Education Reform, “a political action committee supported largely by hedge fund managers” according to the website DFER Watch. That site also identified Steven Klinsky, CEO and founder of New Mountain Capital, and Peter Ackerman, a former member of the Cato Institute‘s Board of Directors, as major DFER funders. Both Klinsky and Ackerman are closely affiliated with the Republican Party’s most restrictive anti-public education constituencies.

There’s a reason these billionaires and venture capitalists want into the education business, in the Associate Press article above we learn these for-profit institutions want public funding. Jeanne Allen, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform insists “states and individual school districts ultimately must … allow charters to use bonds and other public construction funds or give them more money to build their own facilities.” Allen is not the only private charter school supporter planning on feeding deep from the public trough, the Texas State Board of Education plans to spend $100 million of its $22.1 billion Permanent School Fund on vacant shopping malls to house charter schools, suggesting the permanent endowment “might earn eight percent” on this investment by leasing those empty shopping malls to charter schools. The article didn’t inform the reader that shopping malls have been a poor investment since the economic collapse of 2001, as malls across America go in foreclosure or become bank-owned.

Normally national stature politicians would be expected to protect this vital American institution, unfortunately the Republican Party is running currently on an agenda which includes the destruction of universal free education. "I'd start by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education," Utah Republican Senate nominee Mike Lee is quoted in Think Progress just days before the national election. Lee is hardly alone in this outlandish demand. Nevada's Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle insists “its not the federal government's job to provide education for our children,” and promises to unfund all federal education mandates. This is not just the thinking of the Republican Party fringe, currently more than 111 Republican members of Congress or candidates who have stated their support for abolishing the US Department of Education. Nor is this a new phenomenon, in1996, the Republican Party platform declared: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” Where elected Republican officials, such as would-be Presidential-candidate Michael Bloomberg have control over local government these goals are being actively pursued. Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City’s “Department of Education has closed nearly 100 regular public schools and replaced them with charter schools or new schools,” Ravitch tells us.

Key to destroying public education has been the transformation of America’s once revered public educational institutions. The first step in this process was Brown v. Board of Education which made integration of public schools the law of the land, however the reluctant nation didn’t experience integration until Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education mandated busing.

“Though public schools were technically desegregated in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, many were still de facto segregated due to inequality in housing and racial segregation in neighborhoods. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of busing to end school segregation and dual school systems, on Charlotte, North Carolina and other cities nationwide to affect student assignment based on race and to attempt to further integrate schools.”

When white parents saw a proportional increase in the number of children of different colors in the classroom, white flight began. Here in the East Bay white families moved to new developments in former agricultural lands such as Walnut Creek and further east, while others moved north to developments in Marin’s former agricultural lands. Many of those who remained placed their children in parochial or private schools, reducing the number of affluent white children in the public schools, and parents who could afford to donate time, money and political connections to keep the quality of local education at levels competitive for the limited number of student spots at prestigious colleges. The removal of white children from public schools increased the proportion of children of other ethnic identities, exacerbating the situation to the de facto segregation seen in many local public schools today. Concurrent with white flight was the increased resistance to public education. Parents spending $1,000 to $2,500 per month, per child, on segregated private schools complained about the high tax burden of public education. The national renaissance of nativist evangelical Christianism exacerbated the situation with its intolerance for other religious beliefs, abortion, single mothers, and gay rights. These wedge issues were used by the Republican party and corporate opportunists to disparage public education. This did not happen in a vacuum. Lobbyists, propagandists and political operatives were paid substantial sums of money to deliberately stoke the flames of intolerance. Richard Berman, aka “Doctor Evil,” of Washington, DC.-based Berman and Company is one such lobbyist paid millions of dollars a year by Tyson Foods, Wendy’s International, Arby’s, Hooters, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and other corporations and wealthy individuals to disseminate anti-consumer and anti-teacher propaganda through shadow organizations such as “The Center for Union Facts” and “Teachers Union Exposed.” As of May 2009, Berman and Company runs at least fifteen corporate-funded shadow groups created to sway public perceptions. Although his allegations are almost universally disputed, he is frequently cited as an authority on education in the national media, and he is encouraged to published opinion pieces criticizing public education.

Against this well-funded and highly organized effort to destroy universal free public education in America, LNCB, and its honest supporters have little chance of substantially improving education for the vast majority of economically disadvantaged students in the face of a society that embraces racial segregation and economic oppression. While privatized schools receive excellent reviews in the media, the educational results have been mixed at best. Again, Ravitch tells us, this time in the Los Angeles Times, “there is a widespread impression that any charter school is better than any public school. This is not true. Charter schools vary in quality from excellent to abysmal.” When charter schools are able to show substantially improved results, those results typically come from small, well-funded, homogenous population schools which cherry-pick the best students. Again Ravitch puts it best:

“One of the major arguments for turning schools over to private managers is that the resulting competition will spur improvements in the public schools. This did not happen in Philadelphia, nor is there evidence that it has happened elsewhere. Many charter and privately managed schools get extra resources and smaller classes with the help of corporate sponsors, but public schools typically do not. What the public schools do get are the low-performing and disruptive students who are ejected by or eased out of the charter and privately managed schools.”

It seems the two real benefits to privatization are private profits from the public tills for the corporations that own and manage these schools, and racial segregation. These types of schools have always existed in America but it used to be that they were called private schools, now they’re called ‘charter’ schools. It used to be that America stood for equal opportunity for all its citizens, but now the cherished rights enumerated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights seemed to be set aside just to benefit the rich and the white.



WORKS CITED
Flanigan, James, “Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform,” New York Times. February 16, 2006 web.

Grannan, Caroline “Former GOP insider: Billionaire Boys' Club dismantling public education.” SF Examiner/Education. March 25, 2009. Web. Oct. 25, 2010.

Keyes, Scott. Think Progress. “111 Republican Incumbents And Candidates Want To Eliminate The Department Of Education” Oct. 29, 2010. Web. Oct. 30, 2010.

Libby, Ken. “About DFER Watch.” DFER Watch. July 11, 2010. Web. Oct. 30, 2010

Meier, Deborah, and George Wood, Alfie Kohn, Linda Darling-Hammond, Theodore R. Sizer. Many Children Left Behind. Boston. Beacon Press, 2004.

Noguera, Pedro. “A New Vision of School Reform.” The Nation. June 14, 2010. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Philanthropy Journal. “JPMorgan Chase investing in charter schools,” May 5, 2010. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Ravitch, Diane. “Will Public Education Survive the Embrace of Big Money?” Education Week. Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“Charter and private schools might not make the grade either.” Los Angeles Times. Aug. 11, 2009. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

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