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Thursday, May 04, 2006A Little StoryImagine... Your name is Mohammed Abdul Karim. Though you have been in America eight years, your features do nothing to hide your Pakistani origins. Right now, you are going to school in Washington DC. Not one of the prestige schools, sorry. You work the crap shift at a convenience store to pay for your schooling, and right now, you're wishing you didn't. You pulled an all-nighter - 4 a.m. after work till 10 this morning to get your English paper in on time. And while you got a few zees from 3 o'clock till 5, your roommate hauled you off to some get-together at six. At 10 o'clock, you left to change for work, and you know you're dead because it's almost midnight and you're still working your way toward Al's Mart. But you're so tired, you've taken a few wrong turns, and you're starting to weave. You notice, maybe half-notice, a few police cars up ahead, and your sleep deprived brain decides to turn off the lights so they won't notice you. You don't realize you're outside the offices of the Fed because, well, this isn't a part of town you come to often. Suddenly you are blinded by the lights of a police cruiser. And you're weaving into its path! You grab the wheel, swerve, and crash into a security barricade. You leap out of the car, terrified it will blow up, terrified you'll be arrested, terrified by anything else your addled mind can come up with to be terrified by. You utter a few choice words, and of course they come out in Pakhto. There's light again, the flashlights of two policemen running toward you. You try to find the English to tell them you're running late for work, you're sorry, you're... screwed. There you are, car crashed into a security barrier near a federal building, your vaguely Arabic features illuminated by police flashlights, and after nearly running into a cop car with your lights off. Two questions: What do you think is going to happen to you? Don't you wish you were a pasty-faced white guy with a name like Patrick Kennedy? 
posted by gbarto at 9:26 PM Are you a Kennedy? Lots of people wonder if, maybe, they're Kennedys. The TurkeyBlog is happy to offer a special test to help. 1. At around 2 a.m., drive to a carefully guarded government building. 2. Turn off your lights. 3. Weave between lanes a little bit. 4. Narrowly miss a police cruiser, then slam into a security barrier outside the carefully guarded government building. 5. Claim you're late for work and they have to let you go. Did you wake up in jail? Sorry, you're not a Kennedy. Did you wake up in your own bed, the police having driven you home without even performing a sobriety test? You might just be a Kennedy! I love those Kennedys. Paragons of the working class, always shoulder to shoulder with the little guy. It's like they're one of us. For the record, I have known people - elected people - who came off better or worse when things like this happened. And I know life ain't easy for Pat right now. But it's a lot easier than were his name Joe Nobody and his occupation were bartender. Remember this story the next time you see any rep or senator talking about the need to hold people accountable for their actions. Remember how reflexively this rep invoked a rule whose purpose was to keep our institutions free and prevent the government from locking up opposition leaders when things got dicey. Remember, when Senator Kennedy thumps on Bush about abridging the Constitution, just how casually his younger fellow Kennedy used our Constitutional safeguards against the abuse of power for the sake of avoiding the law. When we fight a drug war, nobodies with joints go to jail because they had them, no matter how, where or under what circumstances. But when the powerful get close enough to the Capitol, the law ceases to apply, apparently. Kennedy, of course, should now be left alone. He played the same game most anyone with his power, privilege and background would have. But if Congress doesn't take action to clarify the role of the Capitol Police in such situations in the future, and if the individual members don't speak out about how embarrassed they are that they have let things come to this, with the Capitol Police assuming they're supposed to make these things go away, we will know that the whole institution is as rotten as the Kennedy Clan. One more reason to throw the bums out.
posted by gbarto at 8:29 PM Monday, May 01, 2006Roger L. Simon has pictures from the immigrant rallies, including one that really gets me shaking my head:If you think I'm "illegal" because I'm Mexican, learn the true history because I'm in my homeland. I keep seeing this sentiment pop up and I wonder where all the liberal social studies teachers are. Doesn't this parse as: How can you call this Anglo country? The Spaniards took it from the Pueblo first! Or are the earlier Native American inhabitants only people when it's Estadounidensienes oppressing them?
posted by gbarto at 9:15 PM On the Immigration Protests/Walkouts I work in a business with a fair number of immigrants on the payroll. So far as I know, no one has failed to turn up. One person called to find out if there was a holiday or not. She was a bit upset, as she'd been planning on working. But our business only employs legal immigrants who have gone to the trouble to come here legally and have their papers in order. Watching what some of our employees have put up with in order to maintain permission to work with us, I find the way they're approaching today's protests disgusting. People who come here legally and do their best to function in America in no way deserve to be lumped in with those who show up and demand full rights as citizens that actually our legal residents do not enjoy. And those who demand that they be legalized because they're people too finish by denigrating the efforts of those immigrants making the sincerest contribution to our society by engaging and coming into it within the rules. I have written a fair amount about the horrors of the INS/DHS, their idiocy and the need for good a-- - kickings for some of the officials of those agencies. I have called for fairer, more open and more understanding processes. But the INS/DHS might do a better job if they weren't constantly confronted with millions who start by circumventing immigration procedures but then insist on working within the regulatory frameworks of the US with its protections for people's rights when caught. Maybe if the INS/DHS wasn't holding so many hearings over Mexicans here illegally, they'd do a better job processing the paperwork of those playing by the rules. When illegal immigrants win, everybody loses. Especially legal immigrants who today are being lumped in with lawbreakers for the political purposes of the Democratic party, the labor unions and Latino activists who count on legal immigrants for support while writing them off as suckers at the end of the day. Mr. Goldstein's post is cute, and it's right on target vis-à-vis the illegals. But it misses the mark with the many legal immigrants I work with, legal resident aliens who make their contribution and deserve better than to have their efforts to comply with our rules and work within our society tarnished by supposed hermanos y hermanas who want to go ahead of their brothers and sisters in line for our society's rights and priveleges.
posted by gbarto at 1:11 PM Sunday, April 30, 2006Who doesn't believe in complex adaptive systems?What Lenin, Gore and Jeremy Rifkin have in common with Falwell, Buchanan and Bin Laden Though the book is old - 1994 - it was not until this evening that I picked up Murray Gell-man's The Quark and the Jaguar, or, for me, Le quark et le jaguar. I picked up a translated copy in a used book store to practice my French and dip into the musings of someone who came up in Feynman from time to time. The Quark and the Jaguar is about the simple, the complex and complex adaptive systems. In the preface, Gell-man promises to talk about how complex adaptive systems tend to ever greater complexity in part 2. He promises to discuss the need to protect diversity in part 3. It may make more sense when I get there, but what came first was a chortle and a reminder of a thought that amuses me no end whenever evolution comes up: Why is it that the environmental left is forever nattering about the need to protect this, preserve that and restore the other while simultaneosly insisting that Darwinian evolution be taught in our schools? How can you teach evolution while preventing it happening? How is it that the hard right, with notions of man's dominion over earth and animal, can simultaneously oppose environmentalism, social programs, etc, and the teaching of evolution and natural selection? How can you watch, nay favor, letting evolution happen around you while preventing it being taught? (And even more bizarrely, think at the same time that Congress and a President can undo other forms of social change?) I think it comes down to twin traces of arrogance and humility, contradictory characteristics that tend to pop up in anyone of sufficient personality to be worth talking about. The hard right is arrogant enough to appropriate to humanity anything humanity might desire, save coca and mary jane, of course. But it is also possessed of a humility that assumes that God's green earth will so remain, man's effects being insufficient to completely despoil it. This is wishful thinking - another characteristic that pops up in most people. The hard left is humble enough to worry that man does not in fact have the right to do whatever he wants with the earth. But it is possessed of an arrogance that in the process of trying to downplay man's importance actually inflates it. If we're insignificant, can we really destroy the earth? And does the earth really depend on us to save it? Who are we to think it's up to us? And who are we to think that the pristinity in which the planet must be preserved is the vision we have? What can be said with surety about the hard right and the hard left is that they're both nuts. The sane are free to mock Pat Buchanan's dreams of returning to an idealized 1950s America that never was. But the contrast between Pat Buchanan and the environmental left is not in intelligence or sanity, merely in which idealized world-that-never-was they wish to restore. Whatever your leanings, once you start leading people back to lost Eden it's safe for the rest of us to assume you're either nutters, dangerous or both. There is in this discussion, another elephant who has just started nosing his trunk into the room: Those who preach restoration of the lost Caliphate - Al Qaeda and recent incarnations of Saddam, to name two - take this stuff to a whole different level. Yet they are not totally at odds with those who took Rousseau's "Man is born free..." bit and gave us the Reign of Terror and its godson, the October Revolution in an effort to make things right. What we teach our children is important. This is brought home by the information control seen in communist and other totalitarian regimes. But we have it here too: What we fight hardest to teach or not teach them is especially important, marking out those places where our efforts to transmit civilization give way to efforts to redefine and transform it. When it comes to the teaching of evolution question, it isn't science against ignorance. It's competing ideologies, each trying to use the education establishment to transmit political notions about man's relation to the rest of the world. The creationists are ignorant about science, failing to notice that they're surrounded by six-foot tall people who live 70 and 80 years. The evolutionists, for their part, are ignorant about themselves, failing to see how passionately they cling to and construct a worldview on the little bits we do know and arrogantly assuming that the stuff that they don't understand about origins, the meaning of life and the why of the universe are non-existent questions since they lack the answers. There are, of course, people in the middle. Not that the TurkeyBlog is accustomed to being in the middle of anything, save the argument, I myself favor teaching evolution as a thing that is obviously happening around us while offering the caveat that understanding a mechanism is not the same thing as having the Truth with a capital T, and suggesting that the religion department and not the biology department is the place to discuss the implications of the obvious presence of an evolutionary mechanism in the world's unfolding. I think this is a fair position. I also think it's fair to argue about it. The people who are scary are those who know more than is at present humanly knowable and insist that others see the world in the same terms. The environmental left and hard right stand in fierce opposition to one another, no question. But we would do well to be as wary of both as we are of Al-Qaeda and to be careful to give our full support to neither, for both offer Edenic visions that cause even really smart people to lose their reason in as little as three carefully edited paragraphs. Like a Nobel Prize winning physicist who studies complex adaptive systems and their tendency toward greater complexity en route to suggesting human intervention to sustain diversity. It is therefore a hopeful thing, rather than discouraging, that most of us are either skeptical of, or, more often, ignorant and indifferent to all this discussion. It is one of many mechanisms that assure the continued functioning of that delightfully complex and adaptive system known as these United States of America.
posted by gbarto at 11:44 PM |
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