President Obama plans to reform the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. George W. Bush’s signature educational legislation, NCLB intended to improve test scores and school accountability. It federalized educational standards and expanded the nation’s education budget.

Like most Bush policies, No Child Left Behind was poorly thought out and detrimental to the poor. It focused on standardized testing rather than learning. It penalized poor schools with high dropout rates rather than look at the deeper reasons for these educational failings. It allowed states to refuse to give exams in languages other than English, punishing schools with high immigrant populations. Schools who did not measure up to improved test scores could lose their federal funding.

Since NCLB failed to work, Americans have looked for a scapegoat. The popular victims have become teachers. Recently, a Rhode Island school district fired every single teacher in a failing school. Politicians on the national, state, and local level believe in holding teachers directly accountable for student progress. Blaming teachers is easy. It gives us someone to point to rather than ourselves, even if teachers do their best to educate our children.

Teacher unions have especially come under attack. Teachers unions’ effectiveness in protecting their members has outraged conservatives. Like during most attacks on labor rights, conservatives use the most egregious cases of teacher incompetence to attack the entire existence of teacher unions.

What Republicans really want is to eviscerate the unions, promote taxpayer funded religious schools, and bring in corporations to run public schools. Given corporate mismanagement of the economy, this is a recipe for disaster.

Do our schools have some bad teachers? Sure. But the average teacher uses every strategy possible to help students learn. They mentor students outside of class, coach them in after school sports, and try to reach them within the classroom.

I went to a poorly funded high school in a white working-class Oregon logging town. I had some terrible teachers who went through the motions. But I also had wonderful ones, including a couple that set me on the path to becoming a historian. I am forever grateful to them.

Thanks to good teachers, American schools are not failing any more than they ever have. The nation’s education system has always reflected political trends and entrenched inequality. The poor and people of color have always received substandard education. That continues today. Most of the supposedly failing schools are in poor neighborhoods, serving traditionally underrepresented communities.

Throughout the 20th century, African-Americans and other historically marginalized groups moved to northern and western cities to create a better life for themselves and their children. They hoped their children would receive better education than they did. For a time, mixed race student bodies became common.

But northern whites did not want to live next to African-Americans. Tensions in these racially mixed schools led to fights. Riots in Detroit, Chicago, and other northern cities during World War II displayed American racism for the world to see. Whites fled to the suburbs after World War II. Their tax dollars went with them, leaving impoverished, African-American dominated inner cities without the means to fund decent schools.

By the 1960s, African-Americans had become increasingly desperate over the lack of education, employment, and social services in the cities. Police violence contributed to this general frustration and led to the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and many other cities in that decade.

White flight has caused our current education problems. Rather than blame teachers, we should recognize this problem as reflective of the massive racial and class divides in the United States. We refused to deal with these problems in the 1960s, and we continue to ignore them today.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s educational reforms, while improving on No Child Left Behind, do not deal with the root causes of educational problems. Inherent race and class prejudice is not being addressed.

Obama supports eliminating the penalization of the lowest performing schools and focusing on a longer-term measurement of school improvement over time. However, he still supports standardized testing and punishing teachers of low-performing students.
Obama also defended the firing of the Rhode Island teachers, which is little more than cheap political rhetoric.

Why would a young teacher take a job in such a school if they might get fired? How would that help their career? How does punishing all the teachers in a school help solve any problems? Who will take their place? These questions remain unanswered.

The nation does need to revolutionize its education system. Obama’s reforms are a useful start, but they are only a drop in the bucket. We need to centralize American schools under federal rather than state and local control, dividing money equally among all students rather than privileging those from wealthy backgrounds.

We will have to raise taxes to pay for better teacher salaries. If we want great teachers, we need to pay them. We must make the profession appealing for the nation’s smartest people. We have to recognize that taxes have benefits. If we want good education, it will cost us.

We also must realize that teachers cannot create educated children by themselves. Teachers play a positive role in children’s lives, but they cannot overcome a bad home environment, a lack of employment, or a paucity of after-school activities. We also need to raise taxes to finish Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Poverty combined with racism creates conditions that make it very difficult for children to learn. Fighting poverty is fighting for our children’s future.

Society, not schools and teachers, have failed our students. Standardized testing, firing teachers, and tinkering with reforms will not solve these problems. A solution must include fighting poverty and raising taxes. Nothing else will do.

Raising some tomatoes in the backyard isn’t exactly new—my mother did so when I was younger, and though she hardly kept us afloat through the fruits of her labor, it was nice to have fresh veggies on the table.

Peggy Orenstein had a piece this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The Femivore’s Dilemma.” She starts her article by talking about all her hip friends—cracking wise about “the Vatican of locavorism” and laughs, “Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.”

Her feminist friends are now not just staying home to raise the kids, but finding liberation in raising chickens, growing food, and making other necessities. But her casting of backyard hobby gardening as fulfilling the holes in the lives of feminists who wanted to work, as is usual for middle-class feminists, leaves out the fact that fighting to get jobs was a goal of the privileged. Other women were already working, not for fulfillment, but for survival.

In the same way, backyard gardening, in Orenstein’s view, is a new way for feminists to find fulfillment, a way to do more work than just the housework but less work than a full-time job. Meanwhile, Warwick Sabin points out:

“It used to be that keeping a few free-range chickens, tending some grain-fed hogs, and raising a small vegetable garden was how people simply survived. Now these are often vanity projects for young hipsters and retired hedge-fund executives who have discovered the forgotten pleasures of “heirloom” tomatoes and artisanal sausage. Incredibly, we’ve reached a point in our society where things that humans have done for thousands of years—grow a vegetable, smoke or cure a piece of meat—now provide the grounds for smug satisfaction.”

My mother gave up her garden when she had to go back to work to really put food on the table. The backyard tomatoes weren’t going to keep my sister and I going, and my father’s income suddenly wasn’t enough for us. And there lies the problem, the tension between the hipness of foodie-gardening and the real work of producing food: gardening in your backyard is a hobby, not work that can pay your bills.

Amanda Marcotte responds:

”…for most organic gardeners, even those with chickens, the income you get from your hobby won’t even bring in as much as light part-time employment.

I had the uncomfortable image of Marie Antoinette playing peasant creep into my mind as I thought of wealthy, idle housewives starting a beehive and buying a couple chickens and thinking they were Farmer John, gaining real employment and fulfillment working the land while the actual income that comes into the house comes from the very modern world in which their husbands live.”

Real farming is backbreaking work. Barry Estabrook, in Gourmet, wrote about tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida, who were held in virtual slavery, their wages taken from them, docked, and charged for such things as showers. He described the conditions:

”Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For every 32-pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about 45 cents—almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care.”

Orenstein writes:

”Hayes pointed out that the original ‘problem that had no name’ was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation.”

Alienation, of course, is a luxury for the Immokalee workers, who have to fight for a fair wage. It’s even a luxury for middle-class families struggling to keep the bills paid and maintain that middle-class lifestyle with increasingly squeezed finances. As I wrote when discussing cooking, these labors become the last thing on anyone’s mind when they have to rush from work to home, exhausted from a long day.

Recasting farming as work that is fulfilling and fun is not a bad thing—if growing tomatoes and raising chickens is work that upper-middle-class families do for enjoyment as much as for sustainability, this should raise the status of all farmworkers, right? Right? Sadly, the obsession with eating local doesn’t seem to be bringing any added attention to exploited farmworkers or hungry people the world over who can’t afford a spare chicken and don’t have a backyard to grow tomatoes.

Somewhere between hobby farming and $5 tomatoes at the farmer’s market and slave labor and fast food is a sustainable food system, one that pays people fairly for their work and treats them as human beings, one that respects the environment and the animals. But we will not achieve it by making expensive food a luxury, by applying guilt trips to those who do not cook, or by growing a few tomatoes and raising a chicken or two in the backyard.

We will get there by redefining our relationship to the work of food production—and while we’re there, to labor itself. After all, a society where people received a real living wage for all the work they might do, where the work is distributed evenly among people and everyone has more spare time would allow all of us to buy better food, or to grow it ourselves if we chose.

Socialism? Maybe. But it sounds better than where we’re at, that’s for sure.

Chances are that somewhere near you is celebrating the 17 March. From Dili to Tucúman, from Nairobi to Wasila, people celebrate the patron saint of Ireland. But do they really?

Who was this guy? No one knows whether he was from Britain or France. We do know that he was a slave in the mountains for seven years, eating what the pigs ate. A more humble life might be difficult to find. Aided by a mysterious voice he escaped the land of the Gael, but he returned years later to Christianise Pagan Ireland.

Little is known about his mission. All accounts of his doings were chronicled after his death. The only primary accounts are two letters written by Patrick, in which he declares that he “baptised thousands of people”, ordained priests to continue his work and targeted wealthy women, some of whom became nuns in the face of family opposition, and the sons of kings. [Charles-Edwards, T. M. (2000), Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]

If this was not enough to cement his mission, Patrick reputedly banished the snakes, used the natural flora to explain the Holy Trinity and even baptised one of Ireland’s greatest warriors, Oisín mac Fionn, after his return from Tír na nÓg (Land of Youth).

It does make one wonder about the steadfastness of the Irish to yield their gods so quickly, while not under the threat of arms. Although since all remaining documents are accounts kept by the early Irish Christian Church, there is room for a little scepticism. Naturally 17 March is a holy day of obligation in Irish Catholicism – a day for solemn reflection and mass going.

But what has any of this to do with Paddy’s Day? Not very much at all. The current practice of parades through towns and cities, dying rivers green and drinking enough alcohol to float an armada is a recent phenomenon.

Parades were not seen in Ireland itself until the mid twentieth century. They began, in fact, in nineteenth century America as a social and political protest against the discrimination against the immigrant Irish. The infamous sign, “No Irish need apply,” was quite in vogue at the time. In an act of political expediency, General Washington allowed his troops a holiday on 17 March 1780, “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.” [source] Both colonies were battling the same empire.

Essentially, 17 March was a holy day of sober reflection in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, whereas in other parts of the world, it was a celebration of all things Irish.

In the past twenty years, the two celebrations have combined a formed a monstrous combination of drinking to excess, dressing up as a leprechaun and generally acting the plastic paddy. Plastic paddys are best described by Alex Massie in the National Review:

When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness. But at least it was confined to the Irish abroad and those foreigners desperate to find some trace of green in their blood.

The Celtic Tiger made plastic paddies of the Irish. Myles na Gopaleen called it a “virulent eruption of paddyism.” We sent out Irishness in flat pack Irish bars to all the world.

St. Patrick’s Day has become a homage to dead gods. Leprechauns and the fairy folk, so beloved of the plastic paddy, are the Túatha de Danann, the fallen gods of ancient Ireland. We sell representations of our gods and a bastardised version of our culture.

Celebrate 17 March however you wish, but remember that if Saint Patrick was wrong, it might make sense not to anger the original gods overmuch.

I’ve heard a lot about “Up In The Air,” partially because it was just Oscar season, and partially because reviewers across the country have written about it as excessively as sports writers wrote about Cassius Clay. This made me want to wait a little while, because reviewers ruin movies for me.

Now I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, so don’t keep reading unless you’ve already seen it, or you just don’t care. To spell it out for you: SPOILER ALERT. Don’t come crying to me later.

The dubious premise for this film is that a superficially suave guy named Ryan Bingham spends his entire life traveling from city to city, where he is hired out to other companies with the sole purpose of firing people. He loves his isolation, and is seemingly proud of his ability to move as neatly and efficiently through life as he does through airport security.

This beautiful order of things is disrupted when a young Cornell graduate named Natalie attempts to revolutionize Bingham’s work by making it entirely web-based. Rather than traveling for 320+ days of the year, he’ll now sit in an office and fire people over webcam. In addition to all of this, Bingham finds himself falling for a fellow airport denizen and travel veteran named Alex.

The movie begins with a voice-over description, in which Clooney’s cloying voice describes exactly what his character does. And it’s within these first few sentences that you get a sense of how cool the movie wants to be. An off-beat topic and the word “f*ck” ought to let you know that this isn’t your mom’s indie Oscar bid movie, alright pal?

When Clooney lands, the movie gets to getting on. We see him moving through the airport with all the grace of a professional; director Jason Reitman makes great use of some fast-cut sequences to really drive home the point that Clooney is, if nothing else, a hell of an efficient traveler. Unfortunately, Reitman’s apparently so tickled by this technique that he uses the same one throughout the entire movie.

We’re later introduced to Clooney’s boss, played by the talentless Jason Bateman. I got the distinct impression from this movie that he’s hit a sort of rock bottom; he can’t even tell himself that he’s coasting on his past fame as the boring part of “Arrested Development” anymore. He drops his character’s drawl within the first 30 seconds of being introduced, ostensibly because even he realizes that he just sounds like a man who pops out of the bushes at the park to offer candy to children.

When Clooney meets his love interest, played by Vera Farmiga, it’s difficult to say anything along the lines of “sparks fly.” This is in large part because George Clooney’s entire approach to acting is to just be George Clooney.

In terms of the business of movies, it’s brilliant, because putting him in your movie translates into large box office. Girls think he’s dreamy. And we guys don’t mind him because at least he’s kind of old – that makes it a little less threatening when your date comes out of the theater starry-eyed, and spends the rest of the night calling you “George” by accident and then sort of sighing in resignation instead of apologizing.

There’s a scene in which Vera Farmiga and George Clooney, both connoisseurs of hotel and business lounges, compare hotel, rental car, and diner cards. It is, at best, a weak rip-off of the “American Psycho” scene with the business cards, only with a forced penis joke.

George Clooney’s impression of being drunk during their initial meeting embodies all the things that I dislike about him. He literally just slurs the occasional word and grins a lot. I don’t get the impression that this is some guy who floats through life avoiding any sort of grounding or “real emotion.” I just feel like the most irritating character from “Ocean’s Eleven” just outstripped my lowest expectations.

The new girl at Bingham’s company is played by Anna Kendrick. She’s interesting in a few different ways. First and foremost is that her face is about 35% hair. She seems normal in every other way, but she has not been blessed with any forehead whatsoever. On some level, the top 1/3rd of her head reminded me of Chewbacca’s [1].

The second is that her character shows you exactly what the director thinks of people that graduated with fancy degrees from Ivy League schools: they’re idiots. This clichéd thinking also powers a large part of the movie’s very premise, which is that corporations are soulless. It’s the same sort of unilateral, lazy labeling that made “Avatar” such a tremendous punch to the gonads/box office goliath.

As in Reitman’s other famous movie, “Juno,” character development falls by the wayside. Kendrick’s character suddenly comes to the realization that firing people so impersonally could possibly hurt some feelings! There’s no build up to this epiphany; she just gets sad. Also, the music changes so that nobody’s unclear about what’s going on.

To be fair, her character is incredibly annoying, and the fact that she’s unhappy is sort of a positive, though not as much as if there had been a sudden twist, and she turned out to be a Terminator from the future. I realize that this was a stupid hope. But if Reitman can’t care about character progression more than his cutesy acoustic soundtrack, then I absolutely refuse to give a sh*t about anything that doesn’t come from the post-apocalyptic future packing a Judas Priest attitude and a chain-gun.

Her every comedic turn falls somewhere between “memorizing the periodic table” and “fetal alcohol syndrome” on the laugh-o-meter. I have to imagine that Kendrick’s character directions were “Make Joe fantasize about snapping you over his knee and throwing you into a wheat thresher [2].”

As a minor point, Danny McBride appears in this movie as Clooney’s future brother-in-law. Unfortunately, he’s exactly the sort of guy that every other character McBride has played would destroy and/or take a dump on. It isn’t fair to typecast the man, but there are really very few actors in Hollywood who could make me believe that they’re actually unstable enough to smash a beer bottle over a 3rd grader’s head – and then make me laugh about it.

Having McBride play the meek, unfunny shit-kicker we see in this movie is a waste. It’s sort of like resurrecting Bruce Lee and then asking him to do Proust readings instead of being a screaming, perfect killing machine with crazy eyes.

The good bits in this movie, when you come across them, do verge on great. The camera work is tight, focused, and bobs along with the same sense of impersonal purpose as any business executive on his way to a connecting flight. The colors of the airports, cities, and hotels are muted and entirely interchangeable, just like the experience of extended traveling itself. It’s all clear plastic cups, logos on napkins, and the Hilton sign shining dully out over a city that might as well have no name.

But the best part of this movie, and the part I had heard the least about before watching, was Vera Farmiga. I liked her in “The Departed” because she knew how to come across as both competent and broken, all at once. She brings a lot of that same subtlety to this role, managing to be funny and appealing, but still a little off-kilter. She also acts like a woman who’s sexually confident; it was a nice change from the standard Hollywood Cliff Notes version of that, in which writers just try to make girls sound like unlikeable guys.

We find out, eventually, that Farmiga’s character is married, with a family. Her entire relationship with Clooney  was a sort of weird escapist sham that she never actually apologizes for. It isn’t nice, or sweet, or in any way conducive to a happy ending.

The characters all go their separate ways, not even sure if they’re happy or unhappy with how things have worked out. In fact they aren’t even fully aware that they may have been on some sort of journey [3]. Clooney’s character seems a little lost, bewildered, and vaguely aware that he’s better off now even if he was happier before. In a word, this movie ends hard. And it was fantastic, especially for a jaded writer that was dreading everything working out for a bunch of ham-fisted caricatures.

Overall, this movie fell short of what it could have been: a genuinely weird look at a character that chooses to be emotionally stunted. Instead, it was a film about the questionable emotional journey of some guy who may or may not be a complete jerk, with as many charm thrown in as possible. It made up a lot of ground in the last third, though, and was ended pretty courageously. I felt It was a movie with attitude, but one that wanted desperately to impress.

Unfortunately, genuine cool – and real artistic freedom – stem from the ability to truly, completely not give a sh*t about anyone’s opinion but your own.

[1] Sentences like this tend to get at multiple reasons as to why my success with the ladies is “suboptimal.”

[2] It’s an outlandish theory, but no other explanation fits.

[3] This probably doesn’t apply fully to Clooney’s character.

Boston Harbour Islands, 1954. Music, dreadful and foreboding, starts up like impending doom. A ferry is lashed by slate grey weather, the opening bars of an orchestral hurricane to come. Puking his guts up is US Marshall Teddy Daniels, a man who has clearly forgot to pack his sea legs.

“Water,” Teddy gasps, trying to get a grip of himself as Scorsese drenches his adaptation of “Shutter Island” in gallons of the stuff. Black eyes, sweating greasy beads of perspiration, chain-smoking Teddy’s in bad shape. In contrast his new partner, Chuck sits easily on deck, eager to work with the “legend.” Some legend.

Is Teddy even up to the case? A patient from the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane has absconded from her cell, “evaporated” through the walls, and the guards are spooked. Heavily armed, they wait on the dock like the S.S. storm troopers in The Night of the Long Knives sequence from “The Damned.” The score pounds the audience into submission.

Or is it the doors of hell locking you in for eternity? The guards surround Teddy and Chuck and disarm them. “Protocol,” they’re told, but we’ve seen this before and it never turns out well. “You act like insanity is catching,” says Teddy as the guards press them just a little too close for comfort.

Like a latter day Torquemada, Scorsese keeps us firmly on the rack. We can almost hear the rope creaking as he tightens his grip on Teddy and Chuck, who are whisked to the hospital, an old civil war fortress that commands the skyline. The director makes this simple journey an abject lesson in terror, and if Teddy and Chuck are going-we’re going too.

“Shutter Island” is a gothic noir nightmare interpreted by the world’s pre-eminent film scholar. Scorsese packs it full of male trauma, A-Bomb paranoia and future shock.

Does the United States Government fund Nazi doctors replicating their hideous death camp experiments on the island, or is this a figment of Teddy’s hatred for all things German? What is the significance of a ghostly femme fatale appearing in Teddy’s “Rosemary’s Baby” style dreams? Why doesn’t the cultured and urbane Doctor Cawley agree to release vital information to Teddy and Chuck?

Like any discourse on madness, everything in “Shutter Island” can be read as unreliable. No one is to be trusted, and all perception is relative. Ashecliffe’s smoking rooms, dungeons, and hospital wards all conspire against us like an inanimate character, oozing fear and loathing from every brick and ceiling tile as Teddy gradually peels back the layers of this increasingly bizarre case.

Laeta Kalogridis labyrinth script does come dangerously close to eating itself after a breathtaking first half an hour. Does it drag? Its tempting to say so, but “Shutter Island’s” stunning ending demands we re-evaluate what we’ve just seen. It won’t leave you alone as you exit the theatre, and one suspects that repeat viewings will turn Scorsese’s movie into a minor noir masterpiece along the lines of “Angel Heart” and “Out of the Past.”

Until then, trust no one and smoke your own cigarettes.

FOX News host Glenn Beck has set himself up as a sort of modern, media Joseph McCarthy, policing the words and deeds of public figures for Proper American-ness. He’s claimed credit for green jobs “czar” Van Jones’s departure from the Obama administration, and lit out after anyone slightly to the left of Pat Buchanan for trying to drag Real Americans kicking and screaming into socialism.

His latest target? Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Apparently, Beck has just figured out that the lyrics to “Born in the U.S.A.,” that most bombastic of Springsteen anthems, are less rah-rah-America and more – what the hell were we doing in that stupid war anyway? And what the hell did we do to the working-class boys (yes, still boys at that point) who fought it?

Springsteen has been a rather outspoken progressive for years while managing to avoid the type of ire directed at, say, the Dixie Chicks. As far as I know, there have been no public burnings of Springsteen records, even after he publicly campaigned for Democratic candidates.

This probably comes from the tendency of McCarthy-wannabes to spend less time paying attention to what their targets actually have to say, and more time policing their image. Scruffy, blue-jean-clad (white) Bruce, with choruses that are often bitterly ironic but are easy to sing along to, passes muster as long as you don’t look too hard. Ronald Reagan used “Born in the U.S.A.” as a campaign theme song—until Bruce put a stop to it.

But apparently Glenn Beck finally sat down and actually listened to the Boss’s lyrics. Or perhaps a staffer pointed them out to him. In any case, he’s decided that Springsteen is—wait for it—anti-American.

In Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, he mentions that Nixon would set himself up as the debating partner of President Johnson through careful media management. Beck has been trying to set himself up as the debating partner of the Democratic party, as have other media demagogues of the Right for years—most notably Rush Limbaugh.

So does taking on a rock’n'roll musician—a very successful and beloved one, but still, a rock’n'roll musician—actually backfire on Beck? Does it set Springsteen in a place where he can fight back—and will he?

We saw, of course, the blacklists of the Red Scare, where screenwriters and musicians weren’t allowed to work because of nebulous “communist” ties. Targeting popular artists isn’t exactly a new tactic. But is it really a wise choice to target artists as widely beloved as Springsteen?

In an age when the music and culture landscape has fragmented into many different communities, The Boss is one of the few mass culture heroes we have left, one of the few my mother and I can both listen to and cry (the other being Johnny Cash, who being dead is probably safe from Glenn Beck, but then again the safest target is one who can’t fight back).

“It was presented to us as patriotic in school!” Beck lamented, complaining about Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” as well. Of course, “This Land,” which Springsteen sang at Obama’s inauguration with famously blacklisted folksinger Pete Seeger, contains such subversive verses as:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

The Smothers Brothers and Johnny Cash broke the blacklist of Seeger, and Springsteen and Obama brought him to D.C. to sing those oft-omitted verses to a crowd that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, where I stood wrapped in layers against the bitter cold, celebrating the movement the people had made that had brought us all there.

Chris Hayes at The Nation quoted a Republican for Obama volunteer he met at the inauguration: “It’s up to us to stay together.”

Music helps us do that, and that’s scary to merchants of division like Beck, who make more money from fear than from sowing happiness. The music that day brought us out as much as anything; the promise of something beautiful that we fought for as much as the selfish, secretive politics of the past eight years (and if we’re honest with ourselves, of much longer than that).

Patriotic? Sure. Just not in the way you would prefer, Glenn.

Bruce opened the show that day with “The Rising,” from the album of the same title, one of the two most powerful responses to the bombings of September 11th and a song sung from the point of view of one of the firemen who saved lives that day. (As Sleater-Kinney, who produced the other best 9/11 record, sang “And the president hides/while working men rush in/To give their lives.”)

It’s a brilliant, shimmering, hopeful song with a sing-along chorus so simple, so true that you can’t help but join in. “Come on up for the rising/Come on up, lay your hands in mine.” We were rising, that day, all of us. Not because we’d elected one man president, no, nothing so simple—and that’s what Glenn Beck doesn’t understand. Taking down the left person by person will never work, because we are strongest at those places where we join hands.

It’s what Springsteen understands—why his nickname is so very wrong. He is never The Boss in his songs. He’s the working man who can’t catch a break, the Vietnam vet who burns from the things he saw. The soldier who just wants to come home alive.

He wrote the theme song for “Philadelphia,” the first film to really force mass audiences to deal with the AIDS crisis, and he recorded among so many others, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” bringing the civil rights anthem to another generation of listeners. He closed out the performance of radical historian Howard Zinn’s The People Speak with a tribute to California’s migrant workers.

BFPnoted:

it makes me wonder if Bruce Springsteen is doing in a three hour show what ‘anti-racism’ hasn’t ever and probably never will be able to do.

This is what is truly scary to those on the right–that there’s a community out there struggling together and they are not part of it. To obey is easy; to communicate is hard. But those shining moments where we work for each other and we help one another, where we sing together not because of a momentary victory (because one’s victory is always another’s defeat) but because we are struggling together to make the world a better place. This is what Guthrie understood. It’s what Seeger understands, and Johnny Cash understood, and Bruce Springsteen does.

Bruce doesn’t have to lower himself to Glenn Beck’s level to win. He just has to keep playing those songs.

To this jaded New Yorker, the recent political brouhaha surrounding Tibetan filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s “The Sun Behind The Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom” seems much ado about nothing. The documentary, shot throughout 2008 leading up to the Beijing Olympics and structured around the biggest uprising in that Chinese-controlled country since it lost its independence in 1959, was the reason the state-run China Film Group pulled its feature “City of Life and Death” from the Palm Springs International Film Festival. (A subsequent screening of that movie here at NYC’s Film Forum, which premieres “The Sun Behind The Clouds” on March 31st, was also cancelled.)

That the Chinese don’t want to be included in any festival that also screens a pro-Tibet doc is simply as childish as that same government’s naïve belief that all their Tibetan woes will vanish once the Dalai Lama dies and a state-approved lama takes his place. It’s as silly as Americans once magically thinking that the capture of Osama bin Laden would quell Muslim hatred of us.

Of course, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and a modest, 79-minute film – mostly made up of straightforward talking head interviews with the Dalai Lama and assorted activists, alternated with footage of protest marches caught on the fly – needs all the profile raising it can get. Ironically, though the doc clearly indicts Chinese policy towards Tibet, it is more focused on the rift inside the Tibetan community itself – between those who will settle for nothing less than independence and those who believe wholeheartedly in the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way Approach,” forsaking independence for true autonomy.

Then again, this is all merely a philosophical debate between members of the same side, with no real world effect since the Chinese steadfastly refuse to negotiate.

And why should they? Like the USSR during its heyday, China knows no country will seriously challenge its right to run an economically strategic stronghold like Tibet. One historian smartly points out that most protesting inside Tibet are under-50 and grew up under Chinese rule, never knowing independence in the first place. To them this is an economic issue – i.e., Chinese immigrants come into the country, exploiting its natural resources and displacing its workers – above an idealistic one.

In fact, the closer one looks at Tibet the more it resembles just another casualty in an “imperialist cultural invasion” (as the China-residing, Tibetan exile writer Woeser puts it) that has repeated itself around the world since time began. Indeed, the historical parallels are so striking one only wishes the filmmakers had expanded their outlook as far as the Dalai Lama himself does.

The film leaves the audience with more questions – that could have been probed far deeper – than answers. Is the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way Approach,” derived from the Buddhist tenet of always searching for the middle ground between the two extremes, simultaneously a form of WWII-type appeasement to a dictatorial regime?  Is this compromise position also an attempt to keep a Tibetan genocide at bay?

Are the anti-Buddhist Chinese really all that different from the anti-Catholic Soviets – both knowing that religion is the soil that fertilizes uprisings? And if so, how did the pope manage to balance nationalism with nonviolence while the Dalai Lama seems forever to be caught in its crossfire?

Indeed, as leader of both the Tibetan community and the worldwide Buddhist community, the Dalai Lama’s nationalism is oftentimes at odds with his spiritualism – yet he’s comfortable with this “conflict of interest” (which only seems to grate upon the Chinese who can’t figure out which side he’s batting for at any given time).

Why didn’t the filmmakers thoroughly address any of these issues, one wonders, especially since they had unprecedented access to his Holiness himself? In the end “The Sun Behind The Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom” may be controversial, but it’s also a lost opportunity to cast light into the darkest recesses of humankind.

Few read the Ryan and Murphy reports and understandably so. No one wants to believe that members of the Church behaved so violently, or that the Church itself was not interested in stopping the violence. The fact that children were the victims made the horror complete.

Those priests, nuns and monks are part of our society – brothers, cousins, uncles and friends of the family. Every one had someone in the church. No one wants to know that a respected academic put a child rapist in the boot of his car and drove him to another parish. Or that the former Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland was appointed even after it was revealed that he used ‘mental reservation’ during subsequent investigations. According to Desmond Connell, mental reservation is

Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be – permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So, mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying. [PDF link]

Misleading without lying. It is a sin of omission, but maybe a canon lawyer could explain it away.

It seemed that with the Ryan and Murphy reports published, nothing worse could have possibly happened. But what is, perhaps, just as bad is the attitude from certain members of the clergy. It was with contempt that I read last week that the princes of the church suggested that parishioners pay the compensation claims:

A SECOND bishop has raised the prospect of asking parishioners to help pay compensation and legal bills arising out of clerical child abuse. The Bishop of Ferns Denis Brennan provoked outrage among abuse victims yesterday by his appeal for parishioners to pay €60,000 a year between them for 20 years towards compensation bills. Last night, a spokesman for Bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh said he would consider following the controversial lead of Bishop Brennan, should it become necessary. [source]

The mere consideration of such a request shows just how far removed from reality Catholic clergy truly is. Bishop Brennan even attempted the classic Catholic guilt trip:

” ‘I did not cause the problem’ is not the response of the Christian.”

This is particularly apt, considering that in Catholic dogma, intentions and actions have equal weight – oh, and considering the fact that “I did not cause the problem” has been the self-justifying tool of those who chose to protect their own power and status, as opposed to protect children.

The church owes a lot of money to survivors of abuse. Asking parishioners to contribute to paying these bills is despicable, but not unexpected. The princes of the church covered up abuse, indemnified the church against prosecution, and converted many assets into trusts to protect their wealth.

The Church is wealthy, but the wealth has been acquired relatively recently. After the relaxing of the Penal Laws in the latter half of the eighteen century, the Catholic Church was left in ruins. The hierarchy had been scattered and its assets stripped.

In the past hundred and sixty years, the Catholic Church in Ireland has amassed considerable wealth. The princes of the church live in palaces. Religious orders own hospitals, schools, churches, cathedrals, historic buildings and thousands of acres of land all over the country. All of this was paid for by the people, penny by penny. All of this is also something that the Church will not part with easily.

This institution is responsible for many crimes, and it should also be held responsible for payment to its victims. The Church could sell fixed assets, or ask the Vatican to stump up the cash. Asking parishioners, though, should not be an option.

Iraq 2003. The “shock and awe” party is in full effect, tracer fire lights up the night sky and concussion blasts from “smart” bombs shake gilded masonry into the lap of the movie theatre. Fleeing from the chaos is Saddam’s top General, Al Rawi, flanked by bodyguards and whisked away in a blacked out limo.

Four weeks later and Chief Miller has a headache. While the American brass congratulates one another on a job well done, Miller has to deal with the hangover. He’s charged with finding WMDs but there’s one problem-Miller and his team are coming up short. Is the Intel out of date, bad or just a pack of lies?

Paul Greengrass’ million-mile-an-hour thriller delivers. Is there anyone better at handling smart-actioners than the “Bourne” director? So what if he’s teamed up with Damon again-did anyone question Scorsese for using De Niro so many times? Why not embrace the fact that this partnership is unleashing some of the best action set pieces since Lucas and Spielberg signed up the young Harrison Ford?

What is beyond question is the film’s powerful vision of Iraq as a country teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Various American agencies jockey for position, each establishing their own fiefdom in their Disneyland version of Baghdad-the eponymous Greenzone. The CIA and the Pentagon are at each others throats, using the military as pawns in their struggle to decide who will “manufacture democracy” in the new Iraq.

Miller is questioning the intelligence reports that are sending his team on a wild goose chase. Both sides want to get their claws into the Chief after he uncovers a vital notebook that might just stop the insurgency. Either that, or it will blow the lid on a vast Government conspiracy that will take everybody down with it. Will Miller side with the old school CIA, or the new school interns of the Pentagon?

This tug-of-war also calls into question the seduction of the media by the Bush administration and its part in selling the war to the American public. Were they guilty of being glamoured by the promise of exclusive stories and not checking their sources scrupulously? Was the lure of the imbedded reporter too good an opportunity to turn down, and can Miller’s information offer the press a slim chance of redemption?

The other striking aspect of the film is its use of the doublespeak so intrinsically linked with this shambolic conflict. Miller is constantly “off reservation,” needs to discuss his concerns “offline,” and the Pentagon deploys “local assets” to stop him. Even the military have a “detailed media plan” of how they will break the news when WMDs are discovered, “Something they can hold up on CNN.”

“Green Zone” fights on many fronts and wins them all. Greengrass effortlessly shuffles political intrigue and recent history with a rip-roaring yarn that never comes up for air. Assault rifles chatter, grenades explode, and the most sinister helicopters this side of “Apocalypse Now” scream overhead. Spilling out of the Blackhawks is Jason Isaacs, chewing scenery and spitting bullets, and proving, as always, that a film with him in is always better than one without.

“It’s not for you to decide what happens here,” Miller is told by his Iraqi translator. Yet the final shot proves otherwise. As the CIA boss Martin Brown might say, “Don’t be so naive.”

In Mexico, the reaction was likewise significant: television correspondents and newspapermen recounted the horrible event for scores of outlets around the country. When it was definitively established that the murdered kids had nothing to do with organized crime (there had been some debate immediately after the event), the sense of tragedy grew exponentially. As an editorial in the Mexico City daily El Universal said days later:

The death of these young people in Ciudad Juárez doesn’t deserve just a minute of silence, but rather the opposite. It warrants a powerful social voice. When will we acknowledge that these mafias survive because the society, either by design or negligence, tolerates them? When will we stop making cheap politics out of the issue, instead of demanding from local and national governments a precise account of what is happening? How long will we take to keep crime from reproducing itself?

In short, a threshold was broken. The government response to the Juárez massacre demonstrated a never-before-seen urgency. Calderón made two trips to El Paso’s next-door neighbor in six weeks after the killings (with a third planned for March 16), the first resulting in his being upbraided by the mother of two of the victims in a town hall meeting. On the second visit, Calderón avoided appearances with victims’ relatives, and instead focused more on the recovery of the city.

To that end, he announced a plan to spend roughly 50 million on a handful of new schools, hospitals, and programs directed toward at-risk youth, while also reinforcing the federal security presence in Mexico.

The Juárez plan is all well and good (though it seems underfunded), but it also points to a couple of ongoing deficiencies in Calderón’s crime policies. The first is that the president’s focus seems motivated more than anything by the explosion of public outrage. A government should always respond to the issues that most worry its citizens, but in Juárez, the latest outrage reflects nothing new.

Juárez has been the hemisphere’s most violent city for two years, and the world’s most violent for more than a year. Calderón hasn’t exactly ignored the city, but the abject failure of his militarization of Juárez—which is to say, Calderón’s previous best bet for pacifying the city—has been manifest since last summer.

Since then, Juárez has witnessed numerous massacres (though never before anything quite like the killing on January 31), as well as the constant hum of gangland killings (an average of eight a day over the course of 2009). We should be gratified that all the president’s men are finally focused on prettying up the nation’s biggest eyesore, but what took so long?

Nor are the social problems that the rescue plan seeks to address anything new. The news magazine Proceso reported in December of 2008 that only two high schools operated in the city West Side, home to roughly 600,000 people.

According to one recent study of the town’s youth population, 64 percent of Juárez residents between the ages of 15 and 24 neither work nor go to school. This state of affairs is nothing new, yet only a massacre and the subsequent avalanche of attention managed to provoke any movement.

That leaves one wondering if what determines whether an issue gets attention from Calderón and company is simply media coverage. If so, that’s bad news for Mexico, because the hand that guides the media’s focus is fickle indeed.

Furthermore, just as Juarez’s social problems deserved this kind of attention years if not decades ago, one wonders what other cities in northern Mexico are in danger of boiling over. Do the citizens of northern towns like Torreón and Reynosa, both of which have also witnessed acts of violence comparable to the Juárez killings in the past several weeks, need to wait for their cities to descend into complete anarchy before the federal government displays a comparable interest?

Weak local government, the persistent presence of organized crime, a deficient educational system, a hostile labor market, and rising (albeit slowly) youth drug use constitute a recipe for trouble in any city, and unfortunately this describes the status quo across Mexico’s North. Even if other cities are unlikely to sink to Juárez’s depths, Calderón’s government should be paying more attention, before law-abiding teenagers find themselves in the crosshairs.