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Donald's Blog
July 29, 2014 Can we keep our eye on the ball, folks?
Glenn Greenwald is a British journalist who was involved in recycling a trove of documents stolen from the U.S. government. Now he has written a book called No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the surveillance state. From a review by Christopher Coker, in the Times Literary Supplement for July 18:
The list of Christopher Coker's qualifications is too long to append here; he is first of all a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, and can be described as a citizen of the world. Glenn Greenwald is a typical British journalist of the Guardian stripe: anything the USA does is foolish at best, and probably sinister. He is incapable of seeing, as any American with a brain can see, that if you hand over the national security apparatus to a bunch of geeks with today's technology, they will make a list of every telephone call being made in the world, because they can, just as Richard Nixon recorded so much of his own doings 40 years ago that it would take another 40 years to transcribe the tapes. Which brings me to Dinesh D'Souza. Some years ago he wrote such a lovely piece about Abraham Lincoln that I still have it on my hard disc; it inspired me to read a couple of books about Lincoln. Imagine my dismay subsequently to discover that D'Souza is an American so-called "conservative". He has a best-selling book out now called America: Imagine a World Without Her whose theme is said to be that American is under attack from within, a stance so extreme that other "conservatives" are having second thoughts about him. Perhaps he reminds them of the John Birch Society's Robert W. Welch proclaiming Dwight Eisenhower to be "a dedicated, conscious member of the Communist conspiracy". And now the papers say that D'Souza is on his way to the slammer for violating campaign finance law, which is already being painted as a means of silencing him. Our biggest problem is that we are a nation of adolescents. If we weren't distracted by so much white noise from fools, maybe we could get together and recover some character. July 29, 2014 A laugh-out-loud moment I am very much enjoying Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher, extremely well-written and full of detail that reminds me of Britain as it was when I went there in 1973 for what turned out to be 25 years. After she was elected to Parliament, Labour won an election in 1964, which meant that Maggie became a shadow spokesman instead of an influence. Moore quotes her:
Living in Britain during the entire Thatcher period was a terrific education. I remain a Democrat, a liberal and a union member, but I will define the terms, if you please: I know what words like "liberal", "conservative", "socialist" etc are supposed to mean. (Which is why I try to remember to write "American so-called conservative" when I write about certain of my fellows.) I didn't particularly like Mrs Thatcher; she seemed to be a rather shrill Philistine, and in the end she made foolish mistakes, but it was easy to see that she was what Britain needed at the time. Moore's book is a marvellous read, and when he was editor of the Spectator, that was a golden age too. July 29, 2014 Teachers' unions Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, is a Democrat, a supporter of labor unions, and all that good stuff. On July 21 he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called "Why Are Teachers Unions So Opposed to Change?" in which he seemed to say that teachers are hired and paid and laid off just like factory workers. I was happy and proud to belong to the United Auto Workers during the 1960s, when I worked in Mitt Romney's father's car factory. For years I worked on assembly lines, doing the same repetitive task over and over, sometimes above ground (installing the headlights) and sometimes in the pit (starting the nut that held the steering linkage onto the end of the steering column, then tightening it up with a huge air-powered wrench). It was not soul-destroying work, either, I hasten to add; one laughed and joked and talked with one's co-workers: I remember telling one kid dozens of stories I had read, finally realizing that the reason he enjoyed this so much was that he was illiterate, and had never read stories for himself. But the point is that anybody can be taught to do these repetitive tasks. We needed a union like the UAW to look out for us proles, balancing the power of Wall Street and big corporations in one corner, and the government in another. It all worked fine for decades in the USA. Then I accidentally heard some good lectures, and decided that that I needed to leave the car factory and go to college after all, a so-called "mature student" (ha!). I had to choose a field of study, and decided to major in education, for several reasons: it is an important area; it might have qualified me for a job if I wanted to teach, and I was curious to find out why education in Kenosha had basically bored my pants off in the 1950s. In the end I obtained an honors degree, which meant I had a very good grade-point average, having got a few A grades for the first time in my life, basically for reading books that I wanted to read anyway. But I did not teach, except for a small amount of student teaching, and two weeks in the London Borough of Mitcham and Morden, as I think it was then called. (Again, Charles Moore's book about Margaret Thatcher brings it all back: she was Minister of Education under Ted Heath just as the British were raising the school-leaving age and allowing comprehensives [American-style high schools] to take over from the time-honored grammar-school system, probably a mistake of which Thatcher did not entirely approve.] It was apparent to me that I was not cut out to be a teacher. Oh, I could have done very well with a small class of kids who needed remedial reading, but that kind of job was not on offer, and there was no way I could ride herd on a roomful of 30 or 40 kids whose parents in some cases didn't care whether they went to school at all. Before I went to Britain, in a wonderful suburban middle school in Madison WIsconsin, and then in Hope near Wrexham, a village in North Wales, and then in South London, I saw very good dedicated teachers, and I was old enough to know that I was not one of them. The point is that teachers are not like factory workers, and if their unions insist that they are employed that way -- last in last out, seniority rules, everyone paid the same whether they are any good at their jobs or not -- then the unions need to be brought up short. That would be a necessary part of the solution to the problem of education in the USA in the 21st century.
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