Maggie's Farm

Rosh Hashanah starts tonight. My ever-active boys sat still, watched, listened, learned, and had fun with this Lady Gaga inspired Rosh Hashanah performance. Who am I to argue with Lady Gaga anymore!

A few translations:

Days of Awe = The ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, for especially intense introspection, self-correction and launching on better behaviors toward others.

Mahzor = Special holiday prayer book

Shofar = Rams horn, usually, blown from Biblical times to announce holidays, and at Rosh Hashanah to trumpet the Rebirth of the World and of us. In the Bible the day is called Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the shofar.

Shanah Tovah = Our greeting to others for a good year, a shortened version of "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year."

Shanah Tovah to all from Maggie's Farm.

The New York Daily News editorial today is titled "Academically incorrect: Brooklyn College book choice makes a mockery of education."

This comes in reaction to my blog posts (here, here and here), which the New York Post, New York Times, and many other blogs have also featured.

Today's New York Daily News editorial:

The faculty at Brooklyn College chooses one book each year that will be required reading for nearly all incoming freshmen. This year's choice, "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," has generated controversy.

Up front and for the record: President Karen Gould and her professorial force are free to assign whatever works they choose - even if academic excellence takes second place to offering students an unchallenging, feel-good bonding experience.

But that freedom comes with the responsibility to provide inquiring minds with the straight goods about the literature they've been ordered to read. Here, by all the evidence, Brooklyn College has failed.

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" was written by Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at the school. The book is a collection of seven profiles of Arab-American youths living in Brooklyn after 9/11. Each is a victim in one way or another.

Akram works in his family's East Flatbush bodega, which one resident boycotts because "they support Bin Laden"; Rasha and her family are roused from bed and held in detention as suspected terrorists, then released; Sami, a Marine, deploys to Iraq, where fellow soldiers call him a terrorist because of his background.

College officials say the book is in line with previous selections, such as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." In their telling, the reading is meant to mirror the diversity of the student body, particularly its immigrant experience.

But to treat Bayoumi's book as nothing more than an anthology of coming-to-America stories is supremely false advertising. This is not a memoir, but a polemic.

Bayoumi chose the profiles to support his argument that social attitudes have combined with the effects of U.S. foreign policy to deprive Muslims and Arab-Americans of civil rights, with the effects felt most severely by the young.

Had he chosen to tell stories of seven other Arab-Americans, people who immigrated from, say, Lebanon or Syria and followed well-trodden paths to success, he could have just as easily titled his book, "How Does it Feel to Live in the Land of Opportunity?"

Bayoumi sees America more darkly. In the book's afterword, he writes that "Muslims and Arabs are scrutinized for sedition at every turn," that Arab-American life includes "substantial government surveillance and repression," that "today, everyone - immigrant and citizen, activist and spectator - has become vulnerable," that "spies and government informants have penetrated Muslim-American communities" and that "torture has been normalized into American culture."

In sum, he asserts, "What we are currently living through is the slow creep of imperial high-handedness into the rest of American society, performed in the name of national security and facilitated through the growth of racist policies."

Bayoumi can hold these views if he likes. And Brooklyn College students would be well-served by rigorous debate over their merits. But that's not about to take place. College officials say that the contents of Bayoumi's afterward are not part of the conversation.

Richard Nixon's bitter farewell after his defeat for governor of California in 1962: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore..."

Now we have President Obama one-upping Nixon, whining that he feels that some critics talk about him like a dog. Maybe he's angling for votes from sympathetic dog lovers. After all, Nixon was elected President in 1968. Smart doggie, that Obama, huh.

My friend Bookie pretty well sums up, "truly bizarre."

This is a Labor Day reprint of a portion of a post I wrote in 2005, when a transit workers strike was pending in New York City.

The New York Sun’s editorial yesterday said should the Metropolitan Transit Authority “reward the union’s illegal behavior” it would send a “message of appeasement” elsewhere. The Sun continues, that’s “how they used to work in the New York of the 1960’s and 1970’s.”  But, the Sun said, “it is not a way to run a successful city in the competitive global economy.”

I laugh, at just 58, at another of my Forrest Gump moments. The Sun’s editorialist missed that this began, actually, back in the 1950’s, and I’m a witness to how.

It was 1958 or ‘59, and my social studies assignment from P.S. 246, Walt Whitman Junior High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was a term paper about how local government works.

Not having much of a clue, I went to New York City Hall to find out and wandered about asking people in the halls. They all rushed by, with puzzled and frustrated looks on their faces how to quickly respond. In a big conference room, the famous, feisty, Irish orator who built and led the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, a genuine New York-style colorful character, was in one of his fascinating harangues of the press threatening a strike if he didn’t get what he wanted, and he’d bring the city and mayor to their knees as he beat them with his union shillelagh.

As the crowd cleared, I asked Mike Quill my broad question. He flashed his broad smile and said I looked familiar, probably thinking me Irish due to my red hair and freckles. I told him I’d seen him speak years before at the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, while my grandparents’ cousin, David Dubinsky, founder of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was bouncing me on his knee. I guess that vouched for my membership in the socialist workers movement that Quill had been active in since his youth, so Mike Quill invited me to join him and his crew at lunch, at a neighborhood restaurant on 14th Street that served heaping portions of the best corned beef and cabbage I’ve ever had.

At the table, Mike Quill explained to me how government works: It’s all just politics among friends, all out to make their constituents happy, and to hell with the beancounters, and tories, and other allusions to old enemies and battles.

When I turned in my termpaper, all I got was an incredulous look from my teacher, a shake of the head, and note that I’d missed the assignment’s requirement to discuss the structures and laws. I received a C.

After I told this story to a younger New Yorker last night, I checked my memory online, finding this entry at Wikipedia:

"Quill and the TWU became even more important figures in New York City politics in the 1950s. He was a key supporter of Robert F. Wagner, Jr.’s campaign for mayor of New York and became a lightning rod, based on his radical past, for Wagner’s Republican opponent and unfavorable press attention. While the union repeatedly threatened to take the subway workers out on strike, it managed to settle with the Wagner administration short of a strike on each occasion."

The ground was laid in the 1950’s, as the New York Times reports, that New York City’s current  pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year [2005], triple the amount in 2002. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s director of labor relations summed its negotiation objective: “If you know a tidal wave is coming and you can still play around in the surf because it’s not here yet, anyone would think that’s foolishness.” A two-tier pension plan is offered, trimming costs of pensions for future workers. The current union president says that would “sell out the ‘unborn.’ ” A former NYC labor commissioner reflects the city “might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: (excerpt from Time ;H/T: Real Clear Politics-World)

…America is great for a reason. It is looked up to, despite all the criticism, for a reason. There is a nobility in the American character that has been developed over the centuries…

That nobility isn't about being nicer, better or more successful than anyone else. It is a feeling about the country. It is a devotion to the American ideal that at a certain point transcends class, race, religion or upbringing. That ideal is about values: freedom, the rule of law, democracy. It is also about the way you achieve: on merit, by your own efforts and hard work. But it is most of all that in striving for and protecting that ideal, you as an individual take second place to the interests of the nation as a whole. It is what makes the country determined to overcome its challenges. It is what makes its soldiers give their lives in sacrifice. It is what brings every variety of American, from the lowest to the highest, to their feet when "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played. Of course the ideal is not always met — that is obvious. But it is always striven for.

The Need for American Confidence

The next years will test the American character. America won't be loved in this presidency any more than in previous ones. But America should have confidence. That ideal, which produces the optimism that generates the achievement, is worth all the striving. It is the most precious gift a nation can have. The world is changing. New powers are emerging. But this does not diminish the need for that American ideal. It reaffirms it, renews it, gives it added relevance….

A friend of mine whose parents were immigrants, Jews from Europe who came to America in search of safety, told me this story. His parents lived and worked in New York. They were not well off. His father died when he was young. His mother lived on, and in time my friend succeeded and became wealthy. He often used to offer his mother the chance to travel outside America. She never did. When eventually she died, they went back to recover the safety box where she kept her jewelry. They found there was another box. There was no key. So they had to drill it open. They wondered what precious jewel must be in it. They lifted the lid. There was wrapping and more wrapping and finally an envelope. Intrigued, they opened it. In the envelope were her U.S. citizenship papers. Nothing more. That was the jewel, more precious to her than any other possession. That was what she treasured most. So should America today.

That would, also, be the story of my grandparents and what they communicated to me.

We owe much to our English heritage.

FTC Subpoenas 48 Food Companies Regarding Marketing to Kids

NSFW photo below the fold.

The Preface to In The Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, by Ngo Van:

“The only historians I trust are those who risk getting their throats cut” (Pascal). Considering the present “Socialist” Republic of Vietnam and its official history, which is uncritically accepted virtually everywhere, I cannot read this maxim without a strong sense of how narrowly I managed to survive.

In Vietnam 1920-1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, I attempted to rescue that period from oblivion — a period that was marked not only by the struggle against colonial imperialism, but also by movements striving instinctively for an internationalist social revolution, movements that refused to subordinate themselves to the dictates of Stalinist Russia. In the present text I am going to speak as a direct witness of that period. Most of the others who took part in that struggle, if they were not massacred, imprisoned or sent to the penal colonies by the French colonial regime, or forced into exile, ended up being murdered by Ho Chi Minh’s “Communist” Party.

Scarcely eleven years had elapsed since the October 1917 revolution in Russia when I became fully aware of the oppressive reality of Indochinese society and fully determined to revolt against it. For me, like so many others, the Russian Revolution was a hopeful sign of possible liberation. Yet even then, during those early years of my apprenticeship in life and revolt, the rare news that reached us from Russia sometimes contained disturbing features. Oppositionist revolutionaries were being hunted down and Trotsky had just been forced into exile. Through the Third International, Stalin was imposing a totalitarian policy that seemed to us to betray the internationalism integral to every revolutionary struggle. Under these circumstances, confronted with the emergence of a regime whose full horror became glaringly evident with the Moscow Trials, it was natural that our critique of Stalinism was initially oriented around the ideas and partisans of Trotsky.

Since my departure from Indochina in 1948, if the hope and conviction of the necessity of overthrowing the despicable world order never left me, they were nourished by new reflections on Bolshevism and revolution. In France I found new allies in the factories and elsewhere, among French people, colonized people, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 — anarchists and Poumistas who had gone through a parallel experience to ours. In Vietnam, as in Spain, we had been engaged in a simultaneous battle on two fronts: against a reactionary power and against a Stalinist party struggling for power.

These encounters, along with rereading Marx (illuminated by the work of Maximilien Rubel), discovering the 1919 workers councils in Bavaria and the 1921 Kronstadt revolt in Russia, then seeing the resurgence of workers councils in Hungary in 1956, led me to investigate new revolutionary perspectives and permanently distanced me from Bolshevism-Leninism-Trotskyism. I developed a total distrust of anything that might turn into a “machine.” The so-called “workers’ parties” (Leninist parties in particular) are embryonic forms of the state. Once in power, these parties form the nucleus of a new ruling class and bring about nothing more than a new system of exploitation. “The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery” (Marx).

Orwell rightly noted that those who control the present control the past. When history adopts the discourse of the victors, concealing and dissolving all past struggles with a simplistic Manicheanism that obscures what was truly at stake, the present reality seems inevitable and inescapable. The future of human societies thus depends on our capacity to wrest this past from the cold grip of the present masters. Voices have been lost. We must try to bring them back to life; to rediscover the living traces of the relay of rebellion that traverses time; to restore them and to pass them on.

When even the New York Times recognizes criticism of a leftist attempt to indoctrinate students with an Arab-American victimism and anti-American book, the sole one distributed by the college to incoming students and also a reading in the required English course, we’ve surely stirred up something that resonates with many.

The NYTs article, Brooklyn College Furor Is More Heated Online, is largely dismissive of the issue as a blogosphere thing and attributes it, as does the college’s Dean involved in the selection, as “unfolding a bit like the debate over the planned Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan: much of the intensity seems far afield, while the response in the neighborhood itself is more muted.”

The reporter phoned me a few minutes before posting her report, but I was out, and she hasn’t returned my return call to her. (UPDATE 7:18AM Pacific: The reporter emailed me this morning. I replied that she seems to have attributed a quote from Prof. Bayoumi to me, and she just corrected the syntax in the article to make it clear. She, also, added to her article Prof. Bayoumi's defense of the Gaza Flotilla. Sincere thanks. I, also, noted to her that "I understand that you phoned others earlier, but you are the reporter so you determine the priorities of contacts." The reporter replies that she was on the subway and did not get my phone call back to her.)

The Comments at the NYT are, as one would expect there, mostly dismissive. There is one, however, that deserves wider attention:

As an American of Syrian descent I have never, nor has any member of my very large, noisy, opinionated, dark skinned, prominent nosed, extended family, EVER been discriminated against in this country. My children are extremely proud of their Middle-Eastern roots and very rich culture of food and family, generosity and hospitality. Mr. Bayoumi is confusing discrimination with the healthy practice in the US of dialogue tinged with a bit of mistrust – based on the undeniable fact that we were attacked on 9/11 by radical Arab Islamists. The US invites open dialogue – which can sometimes become very heated. Mr Bayoumi should be familiar with participating in heated arguments – which are practiced intensely in all of the Arab households that I have lived in or visited. Arab immigrants have to ride the current wave of mistrust and anger that the proposed Mosque has stirred up. Arabs also have to check their tendency to want people to accommodate them without giving anything in return – something called a compromise. We aren’t the first group of immigrants to have to deal with animosity from US groups who were here first and we will not be the last. Think of it as an initiation to a fraternity; if you tough it out it will pay off handsomely. Mr. Bayoumi, if Middle-Eastern voices have been censored in this country prove it.

After the New York Daily News  reported the issue, and Professor Emeritus in History at the City University of New York, Ron Radosh, wrote about it in the New York Post,  the New York Times, I guess, had to ride to the rescue of leftist hogwash.

P.S.: Many of the Commenters at the New York Times article assert that it is up to the students to find an alternative point of view or facts. A current student at Brooklyn College replies at the New York Times with the reality. (Below the fold, with the remainder of this post.)

Luckily I forgot to bring the bag of Sun Chips I bought when I took the boys to Petco for Sunday's ball game. It is the loudest, most annoying food packaging I've ever heard. The new Sun Chips packaging is biodegradable and compostable. Great for the environment. Terrible for my ears, or anyone else's, at 95 decibils. That's the sound level at which "sustained exposure may result in hearing loss." Not to mention a bop in the nose from someone in a seat nearby. My wife was sleeping in the next room, after dental surgery, and was just woken by my opening the bag.

On the other hand, I may now have an excuse for not answering my wife's questions. Sales have fallen since introduction of the new bag. Maybe a new ad campaign for "Did you say something, honey?" will revive sales.