Day 25  Issues in Modern America  April 16, 2002

 

1. Names. Poster evals back, except for those who haven’t turned in responses to others yet. Collect those. Comments on poster sessions? I thought they were interesting and that people did quite well at them, overall.

 

Distribute readings for those who haven’t gotten them. Pick up your posters on the way out.

 

Complete p. 34 and 38 of Wideman, if you had trouble with those words at the margin.

 

Final is Wed., May 1, at 10:30. I’m leaning toward some kind of optional take-home, but haven’t quite figured it out yet. Just out of curiosity, given the choice between a rather hard take home and a somewhat easier in-class exam, what would you choose? Assume that with either one you’ll have to show some detailed knowledge of all the main pieces of the course in order to do well, though there’ll be more emphasis on the second half. .

 

2. These last days I hope to have some conversations that will be both wide-ranging and searching, that will make use of the readings in these packets and draw on everything else we’ve encountered this semester—which is a lot, if you think about it. I’m

 

With these pieces, I’ll ask whoever chose those selected to introduce and comment on them, then we’ll see where the discussion goes.

 

Start, maybe, with the supplemental readings: on incarceration rates, “road kill,” and continuing racial tensions.  Seems to me the main message of both is something that I hope we all recognize by now: that as a country we have a long way to go to true racial equality. The next article focuses those concerns in one particular place, where there have been ongoing tensions and recent higher-profile events.

 

Cincinnati boycott article (Robert Pierre, “Racial Strife Flares in Cincinnati”: What are the underlying issues here? Sense of ownership in the city? Identifying with the power structure like the vice-mayor’s father, so that an economic boycott hurts you, vs. feeling outside it, so that a boycott that hurts those with power may get their attention? Boycott organizers as “liberators of the besieged” or “economic terrorists”?

 

The boycott is getting results . . . but also hurting some people and groups. How do you balance all that? What did MLK famously say? “Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

 

Wideman, “Whose War: The Color of Terror”: so what about this one? A somewhat complicated response to Sept. 11, again with the question of identification/distance from “America” at its heart. “What you mean we, Kemo Sabe?”

 

Why does Wideman say he can’t support the president’s “war on terrorism”? Because (he says) it’s a “phony war” in several ways, but also a real war, in which people die. “Terrorist” as a term “produced by the one-way gaze of power.”

 

What about the claim that “George Washington . . . would have been branded a terrorist if the word had existed in 1775”?

 

What about Wideman’s idea that terror is within us rather than outside? What about the image of the child afraid of the dark, and his final question: “If a child’s afraid of the dark, do we solve the problem by buying her a gun.”

 

Matt Bivens, “Fighting for energy independence.” Another story in the Blade yesterday about a proposed wind farm for Bowling Green—best winds in Ohio, it said, go figure. The figures on wind and solar, 12:  Toward a “hydrogen economy,” same page.

 

The “costs and true costs” section: hidden costs of fossil-fuel plants include pollution, destruction of wildlife habitats, pressure on areas like ANWAR,  and dependence on foreign oil, which more or less directly drives much of our foreign policy in ways that are, to put it mildly, unfortunate.

 

Also, on efficiency, the cheapest and safest form of alternative energy.

 

An “Apollo Project” for energy? Why not? Mainly because big energy bankrolls the Republican party, 14. A revolutionary project would not be more expensive than the billions we’re spending now on industries that are mature, long-standing, and should surely be able to compete on their own in the free market that conservatives are always claiming they want. Call me a commie . . .

 

Susan George, “Another World Is Possible”: On the “antiglobalization” movement, or “the movement for global justice” as supporters would put it. Sept. 11 as setback  What does it mean, “We are all Americans”? Cf. Wideman’s questions. The charge from the elites: “You’re antiglobalization, therefore you’re anti-American, therefore you’re on the side of the terrorists.”

 

What is wrong with that argument? It’s been made by our president and our attorney general as well, of course, in only slightly different terms. We might as well say that you’re either a born-again Christian or a willing servant of Satan, don’t you think?

 

How does George claim her message is relevant as an alternative analysis of the condition of the world? She points out global inequity and says “terrorist nihilism is one response to poverty, despair and hopelessness. . . . The only rational response to global problems is global solutions.”

 

She calls for a “global Marshall Plan . . . conditional on genuine civil society participation and rigorous auditing.” (12) What would this mean? She suggests funding it with tax money. But what if the U.S. said, “Never mind $48 billion more for weapons—we have enough weapons. Instead we’ll take that money and put it to use fighting poverty, disease, and illiteracy everywhere in the world. The only conditions are that it actually get to poor people and that it strengthen people’s ability to make their own livings over the long run.” 

 

So what about all this? Questions you would like to pose, statements you’d like to make? One thing apparent to me is that the difference between the local and the global is rapidly disappearing. The world is, ever more, becoming a single place, and events anywhere in the world can affect the lives of all of us, even in a place like Bluffton that seems so distant from the centers of power, so comfortably middle-class and white.

 

Even “issues” themselves get harder and harder to separate. Race and economics and energy policy and foreign affairs are all intertwined, as we’ve seen today. Might I suggest, very broadly, that one dividing line is whether we’re willing to accept that others must suffer so that we can prosper, or whether our goal is that everyone prosper?

 

So (to return to one of the questions we began with) what about information? In what we’ve discussed today, all of it readily available, are perspectives that are not very well represented if all we get is the nightly news, especially if we watch Fox. My choices for these final days are openly not “objective”: the perspectives they represent aren’t necessarily majority ones, they’re ones that I think make sense if the basic goal is to move toward a world with as much security, prosperity, and freedom as possible for everybody. I don’t think that’s the goal of the small group of industrialists and their boy president who run the country, with the collusion of Democrats who are only a shade less indebted to corporate interests. But I think their control is not yet total . . .