Lasken re-post from Flashreport: Letter to CA GOP Chair Jim Brulte

http://www.flashreport.org/featured-columns-library0b.php?faID=2013052011262262


I am pleased that you have achieved the chairmanship of the California State GOP, and that you intend to grow its membership in response to recent electoral setbacks, both nationally and at the state level.

I am writing to you because I feel strongly that the only way the state Republican Party can increase membership is through understanding of issues. Efforts to increase the Hispanic membership in the GOP, for instance, show no such efforts of understanding. The party faces generations of Democratic money funneled towards Hispanics through unions and Democratic-leaning institutions like school districts, and this will not be offset by vague promises of a “big tent." I have written in these pages about concrete steps other than immigration reform that the state GOP could take to increase Hispanic membership (http://www.flashreport.org/featured-columns-library0b.php?faID=2013030710523370) and do not need to repeat these here.

My goal in this letter is to point out events occurring last week involving Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget, which the party could use to its advantage if it were properly directed. As we have all been reading, the Gov. claims that, because of passage of Proposition 30, we have a healthy state of affairs in the California budget, at least as far as education. Never mind, for now, that Brown has achieved this through piling debt upon debt (everyone has read this in the papers but it has failed to make an impression- people tend to care about the immediate picture). Yet on May 14, the Gov. gave the state GOP a potential gift, the Achilles heal of his budget and in fact his governorship: The Governor announced that he would allocate $1 billion of state money to pay for the Common Core Standards (CCS).

What are the CCS? They are the Obama administration’s signature education initiative- national academic standards to replace the standards of individual states. Certainly like most of the public you’ve heard of them, and may have been impressed by what appears to be a 100% bipartisan buy-in. Even Mitt Romney, who you would have thought could have benefited from criticizing CCS, showed remarkably little understanding of it, in particular believing that the federal government would pay for it. It is to be paid for by the states- all of it. The national price-tag is estimated at $10 billion, and the bill for California is low-balled at $1.6 billion by the state Dept. of Education. Brown has rounded this off to $1 billion, which he says we can now afford because we have agreed to tax ourselves per Prop. 30.

And what is it that we’ve agreed to tax ourselves for? We are purchasing brand-new standards, touted as the latest and greatest. Certainly they are better standards than those found in many other states, especially Southern states (as I found when I did an assessment of state standards for the Fordham Institute). But the problem in CA is that we already have world-class academic standards, for which we paid a few billion twelve years ago. We spent a few billion more on textbooks to match our standards, and a few billion more on state standardized tests to match the textbooks. Brown has put us on the hook for several billion, not one billion, for a product that will have virtually no impact on the classroom, siphoning precious funds away from our bankrupted schools and entailing several years of confused transition, while Brown seeks political cover by transferring funds from “wealthy” districts to “poor” districts. If he used the several billion he’s throwing away on CCS, he could raise per pupil funding for all kids.

The Governor’s announcement that he will fund CCS was on Tuesday of this week. As of Friday, the reaction and/or criticism from the Republican Party, or anyone else, has been…let me check…yep, non-existent. Like Romney at the national level, our state GOP doesn not understand this issue at all. Perhaps what it doesn’t understand is that in order to prove itself to be a party with principals and understanding, it may have to buck some powerful lobbies, in this case the publishing and testing industries, poised now to clean up in California, as the Governor cleans up politically.

Mr. Brulte, I appreciate your attention to my argument, and it’s an honor to be able to address you through the Flashreport, the journal of cutting edge Republican thought in California. I would very much like your reaction to these thoughts, as well as the reaction of other state GOP activists. As someone who wants to see actual improvement in state GOP health, rather than feel-good words ad nauseam, I would very much appreciate your response.

Notes on my middle-class health care

Today marks one week since my hip replacement surgery at Kaiser in Los Angeles, so I can’t say I’ve had the entire experience. Nevertheless I have some initial observations which I hope will interest both those who have been dependent on today’s medical practice and to those who have successfully avoided it thus far.

I aim to be balanced in my commentary. What I see is that on the spectrum of medical care in the world today, taking in all of humanity everywhere, I’m roughly in the middle as a member of the American middle-class, a designation I always like to surround with caveats because, with all its obvious advantages, the middle-class is tenuous in the extreme. One wrong move or series of setbacks and it comes down like a house of cards.

Nevertheless the middle-class is a relatively lucky place to be, obviously. As I look in one direction from my middle-class spot on the spectrum of health care, towards lower socio-economic levels in industrialized states, then on to regions experiencing famine and the disasters of failed states, medical care diminishes in quality and availability until it ceases to exist at all. I try to keep this in mind as I form my judgments on my own care.

I’m also keeping in mind what I see when I look in the other direction on the spectrum, towards higher income levels until we reach what we call the “super-rich,” or the 8%, or 3%, or 1%, or however you want to designate it, or groups like politicians who, though they may not personally be rich, benefit from a close association with the rich. What I see is that the quality of my medical care appears increasingly deficient, if not downright dangerous, compared to its more elevated forms.
Thus I hope to avoid a lack of gratitude for what I have, while pointing out its deficiencies.

At 67, two years past the big divide on all the forms-“65 and older”- I’m in as important a demographic as are teenagers, as far as marketing and sales. What boomers lack in desire for the latest phones we make up for in elder care needs, a multi-billion dollar business and growing. The proof is in the commercials on the network evening news. Millions are spent every night to show us that our children and grandchildren will cluster about us in adoration if we take one or another of ulcer-inducing, blood thinning nostrums, because then we won’t be pain-ridden, grumpy old things, but loving grams and gramps. Or how about those Cialis ads aimed at men? Am I the only guy who feels like blowing up his TV when subjected to those artful vignettes suggesting that the only way a woman will love us is if we maintain a chemically induced erection lasting no more than four hours? Note to pharmaceutical industry: Back off! There’s more to life than just your pills.

Anyway, to begin at the beginning, one morning about eight months ago I was enjoying a 7:00am breakfast at Wyler’s Deli in West Hills with the Warner Center Kiwanis Club, a convivial group with a median age about five years beyond mine, when I experienced severe cramps in my right thigh, to the extent that driving home was treacherous. A friend gave me one of his Mobec (Meloxicam) tablets, and it wiped out the pain instantly. Mobec is a strong anit-inflammatory, but tolerance to it builds quickly, and when the cramps returned a few days later the Mobec did not work.

After this the progression became strange, in that the nature of the pain changed every time- though it always centered in the right thigh. The cramps disappeared and turned into an aching that seemed to travel around from the hip to the knee, almost as if whatever was wrong with the area was trying to figure out how to express itself. Eventually I went to my primary physician at Kaiser and began a process, starting with physical therapy that did not work, that resulted finally in a referral to an orthopedist. This is where the story becomes both revealing and mysterious. The orthopedist, whom I’ll call Dr. R, ordered an x-ray of my pelvis from a dorsal position. It showed significantly less cartilage in the right hip joint, which hurt, than in the left, which did not. Dr. R was not overly concerned. He said the cartilage loss was minor and that I was maybe five years from needing a hip replacement. He said I had the option of a cortisone shot to the hip. I got the shot and for about two months it provided significant relief. I was also issued a cane, which at that point I required to climb stairs.

Before coming to the “mysterious” part of the diagnostic process, I want to say a few words about the cane. I found that my debut in public using the cane was electrifying. People I had not seen in a while would rush up, concern bordering on grief welling up in their expression, and they would say things like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, what happened….?” Surely I can't be the only new cane-user who has been far from comforted by such displays. I know, as my wife reminded me, that this is how people show that they care, and maybe it’s unseemly of me to kvetch about it. But my point is that this is not how people should show that they care. What I heard, rather than, “I care,” was “I am devastated to see that from the vibrant and healthy young guy you once were, you’ve fallen into an abyss of increasing decrepitude from which you will find relief only in the grave!” Hey, that is not comforting! How then should people respond? Simple, just say, “How come you’re using a cane now?" As far as I’m concerned, that is caring.

The shot turned out to be a temporary respite. In mid-winter, as unusually cold weather settled into Southern California, the cortisone wore off and the pain came back in much more severe form. I returned to Dr. R and requested another shot, but he declined, explaining that I needed hip replacement surgery, and that you cannot have a cortisone shot within six months of surgery because it inhibits the necessary inflammation. I was puzzled because this new diagnoses was based on the same x-ray which Dr. R had said gave no visible reason for the pain, and that had indicated, as he said, that I was at least five years away from needing replacement. Dr. R ordered another x-ray, this one in standing position, and it showed a more severe bone-on-bone situation in the right socket than had the dorsal view. I was still puzzled, though, as to how two such radically different diagnoses could be derived from the same x-ray, so I requested a second opinion and was sent to Dr. R’s colleague, Dr. O. Dr. O told me that orthopedists do not go just by x-rays, which, he said, do not always tell definitive things about what’s going on in a joint. What they go by is pain. If a joint hurts as much as mine did, and other remedies like cortisone shots offered only a few months relief (instead of the six months they can offer), then the joint needs to be replaced.

This conversation was a revelation to me, and I took it as yet another instance where, in our culture, we avoid saying, “I don’t know” (see next essay, “Why I quit politics”). Dr. R and Dr. O had, in effect, told me that they didn’t really know what was going on in my hip, other than diminished cartilage. They just knew that it hurt, and that replacement surgery would likely make it stop hurting. Though I was satisfied that Dr. R and O were forthcoming and competent, I will critique American medicine for suggesting, or allowing people to think, that things are known when they are not.

I will also critique it for allowing people to lie. When my name was put on the three- month waiting list for hip replacement, it was apparently made available to a data base provided to private companies. I got an invitation for a home recovery orientation at Northridge Hospital by a private home care company. I attended the free orientation and found it was an attempt to scare me out of my wits at the thought of staying in any hospital one hour more than necessary. It seems that infection is everywhere, and if hip replacement patients stayed the three weeks that they did fifteen years ago, they would be dropping like flies. What a crock! People are rushed out of the hospital because it saves money, and here’s where we might look at the health care of the very rich. They are not rushed out of anywhere, and they face no risk of infection because wherever they are is scrupulously cleaned. I found Kaiser to be a very clean place and it has no record of troubling infections. But with a three-month backlog of hip replacements, they would have nowhere to put patients if the stays were longer, short of spending millions on new beds and staff. I’m not complaining about going home early- I was happy to go home- I’m just saying don’t lie.

The day of surgery finally arrived. I was quite scared because my previous two experiences with surgery, though minor, were fraught with problems of a decidedly middle-class variety. Fifteen years ago I had hernia surgery at a hospital in Burbank and was deathly ill from the general anesthesia. I actually remember waking up during surgery and vomiting into the oxygen mask, an obviously dangerous situation. If I hadn’t remembered it, though, no one would have told me. I woke up- in “recovery”- to five hours of intense nausea, in the presence of a nurse who gave me no medication. The doctor never came by or brought up the problem when I saw him three weeks later. This is middle-class health care- am I right? Any chance one of the senators from your state would be tossed in the oubliette like that?

Kaiser, you’re not off the hook: Seven years ago I had a bleeding polyp in my duodenum which was removed by endoscope, a wonderful device that has avoided much surgery. I recall that a salesman from the endoscope company was present to observe the procedure. Later the doctor told me that he had retrieved the polyp, biopsied it, and found it negative. Fast forward six years to my precautionary sigmoidoscopy. The doctor mentioned the polyp which he had read about in my file. I told him that it had been benign, but he said the file told that the doctor had been unable to capture it, that it was “flushed away” and there had been no biopsy. He was able to reassure me, however: “If there was something wrong you would have known by now.” Oiy gevalt! Come on Kaiser, you know I love you, but really!

My health care, though, in the big picture, has been excellent, including and especially at Kaiser. In return for 25 years of full time teaching, I get all these services for five bucks a pop, and I’ve come out more or less cured (of course I do have to read in the papers about the blood sucking teachers unions who have provided me with this selfish reward at the expense of my grandchildren's future well-being. Well excuuuse me!).

Returning to my hip surgery, the anesthesia was expertly done. I was fully briefed beforehand by the anesthesiologist, who explained I’d be given Propofol, the drug implicated in Michael Jackson's death. Propofol is an amazing drug because it starts off with a very mellow twilight state- unlike the immediate unconsciousness induced by other methods- followed imperceptibly by something very like sleep. There was no nausea afterwards

The surgery itself went according to plan, and as far as I’m aware deserves an A+.

I did promise, though, to compare my own experience with that of the more privileged. For two days I stayed in a room in which I was separated by a mere curtain from a man who vomited loudly and continually, when he was not shouting at his wife on the phone, “Get the fuck over here! I thought I told you to get your ass over here!,” then continued the abuse when she arrived. President Obama, you can’t hide from me! I know if and when you are hospitalized there will be no such man four feet from your bed.

A note on my pain meds. After anesthesia wore of I was given hydrocodone- brand name Norco. It was great stuff for a couple of days, sending me off into blissful sleep in spite of my ranting roommate, but around the third day I discovered that Norco was slowly turning me into some sort of alien insectoid creature, a really hideous sensation that’s hard to describe. Why anyone would abuse this drug is beyond me. At least alcohol and marijuana accentuate the pleasure centers and bring out a jolly version of oneself. This stuff is some advance attack from Orson Scott Card’s “Buggers.” Question for the DEA, ATF et al: Why are you so upset at party drugs when no one blinks that I’m given a 100 count bottle of these nasty pills and left to my own devices?

All in all, though, I would like to give my middle-class health care an A+, but I do need to demur just a bit. I found that concerted efforts were made to divert my post-surgery attention away from my doctor and towards other professionals: physician assistants, pharmacist practitioners, physical therapists. A fifteen minute video I was shown on the blood thinner Coumadin repeatedly encouraged me to "ask your pharmacist," not once to "ask your doctor." My post-op discussion and bandage replacement was conducted, not by the surgeon, but by a PA who was not present at the surgery. When I go in next week for removal of the incision staples, I will see, not “my” doctor, but another PA (not the one I saw last week). As far as I can tell, I will never see “my” doctor again, or in fact anyone who was present at my surgery. This is no doubt some model of efficiency and money saving, but in my opinion it is a loss. Humans require continuity of other humans for bonding, repair and sustenance. I learned as a teacher that children need to see the same adults repeatedly- studies have shown that even the appearance of the same adult repeatedly is hugely beneficial, regardless of what educational contribution that adult makes. The new hospital model removes a consistent doctor from the patient, and that cannot be good. As I look down the spectrum from middle-class to health care of the wealthy, I would be surprised to see this removal of the doctor.

And yet, of course, in the other direction, towards the health care of the increasingly dispossessed and impoverished, we end up finally with no doctor at all. I’m grateful, then, for the health care I have and give it an A-.

Why I quit politics

Of course you have to do something before you can quit it. I was a novice politician for almost a year in 1993, the year I ran for a seat on the Los Angeles School Board. I walked door to door, badgered people on the street, debated my opponent at public forums and on T.V. I talked to the newspapers, gave them statements, bios, photos. My opponent was the incumbent, well connected in Democratic circles through his political family, fast with facts and figures, thinner and younger than I.

From the start I had dumb luck. Most importantly, the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, declined to make an endorsement in our race, although they had supported the incumbent in his first campaign. I would have been dead in the water against them.

I also had luck in packaging. I was a classroom teacher, and this turned out to be a greatly saleable ballot label against my opponent's "Board member" (Political operatives have learned about this, and will scrounge deeply to find any past connection between the classroom and their candidates).

I stumbled into a lucky situation with a political sign company. The first company I approached, a major one in L.A., had been stiffed by a series of candidates and was reluctant to commit to me. My father had loaned me two thousand dollars for my campaign, and I blurted out that I would pay this up front in the form of a cashier's check. Within two days hundreds of signs saying "Keep Askin' for Lasken" were all over the turf in contention (so called Region 5, the western edge of the city running north from Westchester to Chatsworth). Compounding this beginner's luck was what I found to be a striking naivety in seemingly sophisticated people. For instance, a school administrator, a follower of news and an activist in neighborhood politics, said in reference to the signs that she had no idea I had so much "support."

My timing with the issues was lucky. The opinion in the San Fernando Valley was almost entirely for breaking up the giant L.A. school district (second largest in the country after New York's), and the west San Fernando Valley, the part in Region 5, was the most intensely pro-breakup. The incumbent was not in a position to support breakup, and I had supported it for years.

The issue of bilingual education worked in my favor. Though I supported California's efforts to help non-English speaking children with native language support, I was opposed to the withholding of English language instruction until higher grades. This played well with voters, anticipating the landslide passage five years later of Proposition 227, which mandated English language instruction in addition to native language support. Newspaper editors, including the Times', liked the topic, and I was able to publish a series of articles on bilingual education; several appeared during the campaign.

One week before the election I got a call from a pro-choice organization. They had been planning to send thousands of mailers in support of the incumbent because he had paid them a sizable fee and, of course, was pro-choice. I had only evinced the latter virtue. It happened that someone in the incumbent's campaign had angered them, and they had decided to support me in the mailer for free.

Topping off my luck, I won a raffle that placed my name first among the seven candidates. The effect of " 1. Doug Lasken-Teacher" was hard to beat as product placement.

The result of my luck: I received 36,000 votes, coming in second behind the incumbent's 50,000 ( turnout was large in this election because of the Riordan-Wu race). Had I taken 1% more of his vote, we would have been in a run-off. The day after the election the L.A. Times referred to "...newcomer Doug Lasken's surprising showing."

I remember standing at a newsstand off Hollywood Boulevard at 6:00a.m. reading, with trembling hands, the Times' hopeful obituary of me. Something sank inside me. The Doors '"This is the End" comes to mind. I knew I would not "capitalize" on my dumb luck, but I did not know why. I did not know why I had, at that moment, quit politics.

Well, perhaps what I didn't know was how to say it. I'm going to try to say it now: Politicians can't say "I don't know."

Politicians, in fact, can't say much at all of what they think. Well "Duh",you say. Yes, but when you're in a political situation where you're setting yourself up as the person who knows what's best, who has an answer to complex problems, there's a certain poignancy that comes with the knowledge that you're constructing a facade, a veil of words that sounds right, while the much vaunted human cortex watches as from the end of a long tunnel.

The above mental state was produced by certain types of questions, such as, "How would you increase test scores?" There is familiar boilerplate to deal with such questions: "Every student must receive quality instruction...We must have accountability and standards... Education must be our number one priority...", etc. Not that there is anything incorrect in such sentiments, but if they contained any important policy ideas we would be experiencing a much larger number of high scoring children. I did my best to sling a few slogans, and I used the English language instruction and breakup issues with some effect, but my brain was uncomfortable, my speech somewhat hesitant, and this perhaps cost me the 1% and the runoff.

Delving deeper into my uncooperative mind, I found something truly scary. It's not just that I wasn't in a position to say what I really thought about raising test scores. My hands hover now above the keyboard, waiting for a sign. No sign comes. Some muse has got me this far, but at the crucial moment she stands silent.

What the hell, here goes. Well you see, the thing is... I didn't really know how to raise test scores. I did believe that breaking up the district might improve efficiency, and that teaching English would improve English skills, but I wasn't completely sure test scores would go up significantly as a result. After all, when we talk about raising test scores we're not just talking about a few numbers going up; we're talking about real improvement in children's intellectual abilities. How do you get fifth graders in large numbers to know their times-tables, and remember them into secondary school? How do you get secondary students in large numbers to read books, really read them, from beginning to end? Why would a few corrective policy changes produce such profound educational outcomes?

Hindsight has justified the hesitation I felt during my campaign. Proposition 227 reinstated English instruction. A well funded "Standards" movement took hold in California and in much of the rest of the country, accompanied by millions of dollars in new textbooks and teacher training. There has been math reform, with renewed emphasis on basics. These reforms have helped a lot of kids, but they have not "raised test scores" in the real sense. In other words, although there have been small jumps in scores, there is no systemic, widespread change in our students. If you walk into a California classroom at random you are unlikely to find kids who can read well, or want to read, or who do math with the facility you find in Asia. Nor will you find this two years from now, or four years from now. It's not happening and it's not going to happen.

Why not? Because the discussion is political, and therefore incomplete. Standards are important, and logical instruction is important. But those are the easy parts.

Back to the reporter asking me how I would raise test scores. Let's say a cosmic force had ordered me to tell the truth. What would I have said? I might have stammered, "Well... I'm not sure." The reporter's brain would then have closed my file, stamping "loser" on it. If he was polite, though, there would be a pause, and then I would begin to think. This in itself, the sight of a politician lost in thought while the world waits, is anathema to a successful image. But if the cosmic force could get everyone to wait a bit, I could have given a decent answer. The discussion might have gone something like this:

Me: Well, we have a fundamental disconnect between our media based culture and the school setting. Virtually every kid is taught by the media to gaze at colored images which ridicule schools and teachers. We have nothing effective to counter this. We have not figured out a modern motivation for students. The U.S.is one of the few countries in the world that has ruled out physical pain as an educational tool (Singapore, much admired by math reformers, achieves the highest secondary math scores in the world partly by beating underachievers with bamboo canes). We do rely on the psychological pain implicit in the report card grade, but because of grade inflation, rampant from kindergarten through graduate school, and the glorification in the media of school failure, grades alone have become a weak motivator for all but a few students.

Reporter: So you advocate beating our students?

Me: Of course not.

Reporter: Then what do you advocate?

Me: We've forgotten economic incentive.

Reporter: For teenagers?

Me: Yes. Our surplus based society has extended childhood, resulting in dependence on parents at later ages, but teenagers are in their physical and intellectual prime, and will remain so into their twenties. They are designed to create and work, but the automation that gave us our surplus has resulted in a more seriously underemployed society than we like to admit. There are over 100,000 gang members in L.A., but there are not 100,000 jobs for them, not even menial ones. The standard curriculum in high school does not relate directly to visible jobs. Perhaps shop and computer classes do, but the thousands of jobs it would take to rationalize that curriculum do not exist. Honors students, the handful of clever kids who know how they will work the system, put up with non job-related curricula because they see a path to employment based on grades and general literacy, but they too have to wait. It is arguable that one of the purposes of secondary school is to serve as a holding facility to keep teenagers out of the job market. The first several years of college may serve the same purpose.

Reporter: So...you would propose.....?

Me: Well, somehow we need to have an economy that can absorb many more teenagers and people in their early twenties, and a school system that clearly feeds into this economy. But our technology, automation, may have made this impossible.

Reporter: How do you propose to remedy this?

Me ( after very long pause): I don't know.

End of dialogue, and career. Even an answer like, " We will have to replace our world economy, built up in haphazard form over two hundred years of industrial revolution, with a completely new, rationally organized economy", impractical as it might be as a campaign position, would be better than "I don't know." Anything is better than "I don't know."

It might seem strange to an extraterrestrial visitor from an advanced civilization that we have no place in our public discourse for "I don't know", since we so often, clearly, don't know, but it's basic human psychology at work. Management theorists have shown that leaders get approval for making decisions, for being decisive, regardless of the results (advice routinely followed by politicians). This is understandable given the human condition. We really don't know what we are supposed to do on this earth, or even if we are supposed to do something. If our leaders admitted this in public, society at large might collapse in terror. Still though, it can be something of a hindrance to problem solving to maintain at all times that soothing platitudes are solutions.

So after a refreshing brush with the fast lane, I returned, sober but wiser, to the classroom, where I find I can say "I don't know" a lot,to students, to parents, to my colleagues, and they don't seem to mind. Hey wait a minute, these people vote, or will vote...Hmmm.

Gun control, Boston bombing & the Sequester

[Postscript, 4/17: This essay (posted first on March 3) seems somewhat prescient on the day of the Senate defeat of President Obama's gun control initiative and within days of the Boston Marathon attack, as it coincidentally suggested that a terrorist attack could divert attention away from a failure of the President's gun control effort, but the Boston attack has not diverted attention from the defeat of gun control in the Senate- in fact the day after the attack the CBS Evening news led with the Senate defeat story. Regarding the Boston bombings, we still do not know the aims of the perpetrators. The lack of stated purpose seems part of the strategy. The middle east has such bombings almost every day, in markets, in stores, where no one claims responsibility and the political goals, if any, are left to speculation. The purpose seems not so much to advance a particular agenda, as to spread general unease, and the attacks are effective at that. President Obama does seem intent, nevertheless, on pursuing his gun control agenda. We might fault him for not being hands-on with legislators, in the way that Lyndon Johnson was- Obama is not sitting down across from senators and making it clear that a number of unpleasant things will happen to their careers if they don't vote for background checks, while good things will come their way if they vote in favor. The NRA is taking that up-close-and-personal approach with the senators. Nevertheless, Obama is the only game in town. If he can't lead on gun control, no one can, and that's a sobering thought.]


Most Americans were aware of Fiscal Cliff, Part II: The Sequester, several weeks ago, though Part I in November did not make compelling news, seemingly joining midnight 2000 as a non-event. It does feel, though, as we limp through the current episode, that we are going over some sort of boundary, not only economically, but politically. Unlike previous Fiscal Cliff matches where the parties played a game of chicken and “kicked the can down the road” at the last minute, now the Democrats, lead by President Obama, are allowing the cuts to happen with the hope that the GOP will take the blame. So far that is what is happening: recent polls show 27 percent of respondents blame Republicans in Congress for the Sequester cuts, 16 percent blame Obama, and 6 percent blame Democrats in Congress. The disarray in the Republican Party is assisting the Dems’ strategy (more on this shortly).

The Democratic strategy is not secure, however, and its future is doubtful. For one thing, 31 percent in recent polls blame the Sequester on everyone in government, the entire Congress and the President. If that 31 percent, or a good chunk of it turns on Obama, the Democratic strategy could collapse.

I am among the 31 percent- though I blame the GOP somewhat more- and I am asking myself what it would take to keep me in Obama’s sphere.

It is an unexpected journey that got me to Obama’s side in the first place, after opposing him through most of his first term. I felt until recently that Obama did not have anything to offer the American public other than oratorical balm. Particularly in foreign policy, where his drone strikes and “kill lists” have been steadily cultivating hard core enemies around the world, Obama seemed a warlike president, using his “minority” status and appeal to youth to raise world tensions without anyone noticing.

I tried to be a Republican, and had some hopes for Romney at first. Those hopes weakened when Romney showed no understanding of Obama’s weaknesses in either foreign policy or education, and they were gone altogether when Romney and his consultants made the ill-advised decision to try to pass Romney off as a Rick Santorum style conservative, opposed, for instance, to contraceptives because they reduce sex to “mere pleasure.” Romney found out the hard way that Americans don’t like government to micro-manage morality, and they let the party of “small government” know it.

Regarding gun control, the GOP truly has its head in the sand. Beholden to the NRA in a way that 90% of Americans are not, GOP party leadership (encouraged by Paul & Son zealots) continues its refusal to re-consider gun control, even after the utter defeat in the presidential election of virtually all the crucial points of its platform, including opposition to gun control. In opposing even background checks and limits on assault weapons, the GOP appears comfortable with the most extreme elements of the anti gun control crowd- those who feel that citizens need combat weapons to protect us from a potentially oppressive U.S. government. Someone should ask these zealots what good a heavily armed populace did in protecting us from the collapse over the last decade of mail privacy. Your emails can be read by anyone today, a great boon to an ambitious central government. What good did all those guns do in preventing that loss of freedom? What role did the NRA play in protecting our privacy? Exactly none. The NRA is a useless, self-serving, and quite small group that is dictating U.S. policy.

The country was deeply traumatized by the Sandy Hook shootings, and Obama, freed from the constraints of thinking about re-election, called forcefully for enhanced background checks on gun buys and curbs on assault weapons. This was the first courageous stand I have seen Obama take, after an excessively cautious and short early career consisting almost entirely of rhetoric. I and many Americans appreciate the President’s brave stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Thus in the fiscal cliff blame-game I am among those willing, for now, to blame the GOP. It is a tenuous position, though. The real hardball in the gun control struggle has not yet started. That will take place in the Congress, where key members represent the interests of the NRA. When the time comes, we’ll see one of two things: Either the President uses the type of muscle in Congress that we used to admire in presidents like Lyndon Johnson, and aggressively secures his votes, or he doesn’t, and we are left once again to bemoan the grip of the NRA. Personally I would not buy it, and my support of Obama would be gone as quickly as it arose, and I think many people would feel that way. As collateral fallout the President’s blame-game strategy for the Fiscal Cliff could be in jeopardy.

On the other hand, an incumbent president has a lot of options when it comes to diverting the public’s attention, particularly a president who has worked as hard and effectively as Obama has to lay the groundwork of hatred that is key to starting wars. Any number of countries from Mali to Afghanistan have thousands of would-be martyrs just waiting for the glorious chance to avenge civilian deaths caused by U.S. drone strikes. Imagine for a moment that a terrorist attack happens tomorrow somewhere in America. We could face loss of life and infrastructure, of course, and we would be highly motivated, as we should be, to find and deal with the terrorists. But it is important to understand what we lose in terrorist strikes besides life and infrastructure: we lose our daily existence, the quotidian routine of our lives, including our slow march towards a better society. If there were a terrorist attack tomorrow, how much media attention would be devoted tomorrow evening to gun control, or fiscal policy, or abortion, or the future of the GOP, or Beyonce’s lip-synching, or the Oscars, or anything else from America’s normal life. The terrorists would have stolen that life, our real life, and we would be obliged to sit for days listening to breathless announcements of war, as if that were all we were ever born to hear.

Thus the President’s and the Democratic Party’s gamble that the public will blame the GOP for the Fiscal Cliff/Sequester- in spite of ample evidence that the gridlock is bipartisan- can be assessed only in terms of the present. We don’t really know whose fault the Fiscal Cliff is. Maybe it’s our fault, for sitting on our comfortable sofas, watching the world go by, doing nothing.

Suggestion, if a terrorist attack occurs, write President Obama that, although you support his efforts against terror, no amount of bombing and fear will make you forget his promises after Sandy Hook. He might be saving the free world, but that needs to be a world where American neighborhoods are not domestic war zones. Whether we’re beset with terrorism or not, Obama needs to carry through with his Sandy Hook promises.

War and study in Korea- With postcript 4/13/13

I had two teaching jobs in South Korea, the first in the summer of 2009, at Handong University near the southern city of Pohang, on behalf of the UCLA Writing Project, and again in the summer of 2011, this time in Seoul.

The kids were a teacher’s dream. They sat at attention when I spoke. They were intelligent and responded to everything. When they handed me papers they would give a slight bow, putting forward the paper with both hands, as it is considered insulting to give something to an elder if held by only one hand. If an item is too small to be held reasonably by one hand, like a pencil, the custom is to hold it in one hand, and to touch the sleeve of the holding hand with the other hand, all of course while bowing slightly and keeping the eyes lowered.

The student obeisance comes from a hierarchical system based on seniority, and the students applied it to themselves. At the completion of each course, they put together a book comprised of their written work- one poem or essay from each. When they arranged the table of contents, they scrupulously checked all their ages, so that the oldest student was listed first followed by the next younger, down to the youngest.

In the city of Pohang, on the southeast coast a few hours train ride north from Buson (formerly Pusan), the clerks in stores gave me the same bows when handing me receipts that the students did when they handed in papers. In Seoul, however, though my students were always courteous, the city dwellers had largely abandoned the polite forms. On the bus, young people would rush to take a seat before I could, something I never saw in Pohang.

My school in Seoul was an academy- the term for private summer schools that Korean parents send their children to, so that they will not be idle during vacation. At my academy I taught English writing and debate. The school and my apartment were in the Gangnam district of Seoul, the fashion Mecca of Asia (now made famous by a viral YouTube video). The shops in Gangnam are reminiscent of Rodeo Drive, but the long avenues sprout New York size skyscrapers with a Times Square at every other intersection, where giant animated digital billboards add wattage and a Blade-Runner edge. The couples I passed on the streets looked like they had stepped off the covers of fashion magazines: beautiful young Koreans, dressed impeccably in elegant style. I felt seriously underdressed in my casual teacher-wear as I walked to and from work (though less so at night, especially Friday night, when inebriated young women vomited on sidewalks, watched over by their tipsy and bemused dates). There is a serious ageism at work in Korean culture, I found. When my colleagues attempted to bring me along to "club" with them one night, I was carded and denied entry for being over the age limit (about 35, by appearances).

Pohang, an industrial city with a large port devoted to an oil refinery, was a very different experience. There are virtually no tourists there, so I had three weeks to wander a real Korean city. Restaurants were a challenge because no one spoke English, and nothing was written in English. I need to keep away from shellfish and it was difficult to ascertain the ingredients of many mysterious soups- I’m sure I ate plenty of squid and crab, along with other delicious but unidentified things, but somehow got through it. Once, after trying to explain to a friendly waiter that I wanted meat, not seafood, he rushed off for a pencil, came back and wrote “cow” on a napkin. I had the cow soup, which was pretty good.

Once in Pohang an elderly woman, older it seemed than I was, bowed on the street when I passed her. It seemed to violate the seniority system, but I decided it was a remnant of the deference that South Koreans have paid to the U.S. since the Korean War.

Koreans have had a vassal state mentality for hundreds of years, either seeking cover from Japan through China, or from China through Japan. Now the North seeks cover from the South and from the U.S. through China, and the South seeks cover from China, Russia or Japan (whoever makes a move first) through the U.S.

The Koreans do know who they are, though, and they have a strong independent streak. There is a medieval Buddhist temple in Seoul with a huge dragon painted on the ceiling. The Chinese at the time had forbidden the drawing of claws on dragons, as this represented to them aggression towards the overlord, China. The docent pointed out that this dragon had claws on one forefoot, hidden behind a rafter, symbolizing covert strength. The belief in strength has led to the Korean emphasis on study. The summer academies work towards this end. Having endured the miseries of teaching American summer school- attended largely by students resentful of being robbed of days at the beach or the video game console- I was impressed to see students who felt the best use of their vacation time was to learn. Though parental coercion is certainly part of the equation, the kids seem at peace with it.

Note that I wrote above that South Korea seeks cover from Japan, China and Russia, but I did not mention North Korea. There is little fear expressed in the south regarding North Korea, as I discovered first during my stay in Pohang, when suddenly the foreign press (which I read online) exploded with headlines about a North Korean missile launch. The North claimed it was putting a satellite in orbit, while Western officials claimed it was really testing a rocket that could hit Hawaii or Alaska. I recall reading in the New York Times that the “region” was in a near hysterical state of alert. But that was definitely not the state I encountered in Pohang. No one anywhere was talking about the North Korean launch. Whether my students, fellow teachers, people in stores, or the cable repair man who came to my apartment- all said they were not concerned at all about the North Korean missile- it was just the same old story they always heard.

Then again, during my 2011 visit to Seoul, there was commotion about a North Korean missile test that was said to be a cover for targeting Hawaii, and all the world press put the story in banner headlines, including my hometown paper the Los Angeles Times, which again claimed the “region” was in an uproar. And again no one around me seemed to care. I asked my T.A., an engineering student who wanted to improve his English skills, why everyday Koreans were so dismissive of the North’s actions, while the rest of the world, per its media, was in a breathless panic (a friend actually wrote me suggesting I leave). He said that people in South Korea view the North as weak, subject to eventual collapse. He said no one he knew expected an invasion.

My thoughts returned to the subject this weekend, as the Western press again announced that dangerous hostilities in the Korean peninsula are imminent. The missile launch gambit has apparently lost its ability to excite, having led to past false alarms, so now we hear that Kim the Third has declared a state of war with the south (minus the war). The Western press got two days of banner headlines out of it, though as of now, Sunday, March 31, Easter morning, the story has fallen to the back pages. By the end of next week at the latest, there will be no news reports at all, and the Korean “threat” will be forgotten.


I found myself wondering about the current view from South Korea. Were people showing the same lack of concern I had encountered in 2009 and 2011? Yesterday I wrote my former Korean students to get their views. So far I have received this response:


“It would seem that most Korean citizens should feel threatened by North Korea, what with so many influential international news media covering articles on the current relationship with North Korea and South Korea.
But no, people here don't really care all that much. Perhaps it's a little different in the countryside, but having chatted over the phone about the weather with my gran living in between Gwangju and Yeosu (Southern region in Korea) just minutes ago, I think general reception of the North Korean news is more or less similar all around Korea: unconcerned.

I read a CNN report yesterday which said that most Koreans seemed to be "insensitive" to the North Korean threat. I beg to differ, it's not so much that people don't care...it's just that North Korea issuing 'state of war', while significant in political terms, don't influence individual lives nor cause civilian casualties. If North Korea had fired a missile or sent down any troops (which it really shouldn't do whether it's a rash decision or a carefully constructed plan), people probably would react angrily and quite fearfully. That was what happened when Yenpyeong was bombarded. It was only a small island and many citizens didn't expect war but then were still wary enough to keep the TV on and listen for any updates.

As for now? Sure, 'state of war' is such a harsh verdict after all these years spent in a sense of peace and harmony (if somewhat jilted now and then again) but since no physical damage has been inflicted on South Korea, and since it's not the first time North Korea is attempting to metaphorically or literally 'burn down and destroy,' no one cares too much about the North Korean government and its threats.

On a personal note, I feel as if North Korea is running out of its resources and connections. One is most threatening when he has nowhere to turn to, so I am wary of what the North Korean government may attempt to do before actually meeting its end. However, it seems stable enough right now. I am therefore left with the nagging suspicion that this is again, a facade, one that is becoming less and less plausible.”


The lack of concern is apparent even in North Korea, according to a report from the New Yorker Magazine online edition, “The Korean Crises: Kim’s dangerous game,” by Evan Osnos (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2013/03/the-korean-crisis-kims-dangerous-game.html#ixzz2P3QIQ42R):

“Jean Lee, the Pyongyang A.P. bureau chief and one of the few Western reporters on the ground, reported Friday that, even amid the latest threats, 'Inside Pyongyang, much of the military rhetoric feels like theatrics.' Business was going as usual, and, she noted, 'in a telling sign that even the North Koreans don’t expect war, the national airline, Air Koryo, is adding flights to its spring lineup and preparing to host the scores of tourists they expect.'”

It seems that even the U.S. military is on a more expanded timeline than the media, in particular regarding North Korea's threats against Guam. According to Kevin Baron (Foreign Policy Magazine, March 26), John Pike, the "weapons guru" director of GlobalSecurity.org, criticized the Pentagon decision to deploy anti-missile systems to Guam "in the coming weeks," rather than "in the coming days." Said Pike: "I don't understand what the holdup is. The party's going to be over by then." He means the current media party will be over.

The moral of this story is not that North Korea is not dangerous. It is clearly dangerous. But what is also dangerous is the love of war- as a ratings enhancer- that drives media decisions. There doesn’t really need to be anything happening in North or South Korea for the media to jump on a war story, because it sells- people are drawn to war, as moths to a flame. How many depressed Americans opened their newspapers last Friday and felt a brief surge of adrenalin at the prospect of “action” in Korea, only to face yet another hum-drum day of work and chores? One of the media's job is to keep us believing that we live in an exciting world, where all sorts of compelling things are happening, and what could be more compelling than war?

When human culture finally allows itself to find alternatives to war, part of the transition will involve a change in moral thrust from the opinion-making media, if such still exists. Whether from external control or internal (let's hope internal), the media of our warless future will need safer products to sell.

Postscript, 4/13/13 The headlines have lasted longer than I expected and clearly this story is being taken to a new level, at least a new media level. I still predict that not a shot will be fired between the moment the first reports of North Korean threats appeared- a time of apparent peace and status quo (and still looking that way)- to the moment when something fateful erupts. It will be zero to sixty, peace to war, on demand through your cable box.

Lasken FlashReport post: Bilingual ed. & the CA GOP

CA GOP NEEDS SENSIBLE HISPANIC OUTREACH

http://www.flashreport.org/featured-columns-library0b.php?faID=2013030710523370

Doug Lasken

March 7, 2013

[Publisher's Note: As part of an ongoing effort to bring original, thoughtful commentary to you here at the FlashReport, I am pleased to present this column from Doug Lasken, a retired public school teacher - Flash. If you are new to the FlashReport, please check out the main site and the acclaimed FlashReport Weblog on California politics.]

In its current soul-searching, the state and national GOP is finding that it must reach out to Blacks and Hispanics, whom the party has lost to Democrats. The problem, as conceived by some, is that the GOP has become the de facto “white” party, with “white” interests often defined in xenophobic terms that appeal to few Blacks and Hispanics, and in fact repel many whites, resulting in a white/minority party.

The advice for outreach is good. Certainly in California the state GOP needs to regain a share of the Hispanic vote. But how will it do this? Should the party adopt liberal positions about solving everything with money, perhaps praising the Los Angeles Unified School District for recently showering thousands of I-Pads on inner-city Black and Hispanic kids in furtherance of Bill Gates' theory that technology = learning? As a 25-year veteran of LAUSD, I can guarantee that a third of those I-Pads will be sold or lost before the end of the year. Reading scores will be unaffected. The Gates foundation will not object to replacement orders of I-Pads. Blacks and Hispanics will still vote Democratic. The state GOP will gain nothing by copying such liberal policy.

Then how will the GOP change its “message” to include Hispanics? I suggest that, for a change, GOP leaders do their homework and actually study policy and history.

For starters, party leaders need to understand the difference between Proposition 187 in 1994, and Proposition 227 in 1997. The first decimated membership in the state GOP; the second should have grown Hispanic membership in the party, but didn’t.

Prop. 187 passed but was thrown out by the courts. It would have prohibited illegal aliens from using health care, public education, and other social services in California. The financial logic was acceptable to a majority of Californians. LAUSD, although it refuses to disclose the figures of undocumented students, has, per educated estimates, several hundred thousand. How is their education paid for? No one knows, or if they know, they do not say. The same for the county health-care system. The problem with 187 was not the financial logic, but the social reality. I taught inner city Hispanic kids at the time 187 passed, and I could readily see the chaos it would have promoted. Without figures it’s hard to know, but I anticipated that a third or more of the students at my school would have been denied enrollment and of course health services. Los Angeles would have been a dangerous and dark place, with thousand of primary and secondary kids roaming the streets and getting sick without care.

It was not a pretty picture, but the state GOP, lead by Pete Wilson, pushed hard for 187 passage, alienating most of the Hispanic electorate in the process. The party has perhaps learned the lesson of 187. Now it has to learn the lesson of 227.

Prop. 227 eliminated bilingual education in California, mandating that non-English speaking children be taught English upon enrolling in a California public school. It passed by a healthy margin, which included many Hispanic votes, and was upheld by the courts. Many Republicans supported 227, and it should have been a boost to the state GOP. As noted, however, it did the party no good at all. That’s because the party leaders did not understand 227- why it existed, why it was upheld- just as they had not understood 187.

It’s hard to believe now, 16 years after 227 passed, that for decades California enforced something called “bilingual education.” I put “bilingual education” in quotes because it is a misnomer, purposely devised by bilingual supporters to cloud the issue. “Bilingual” denotes two languages, and a bilingual person is a person who speaks two languages. However “bilingual education,” as practiced in California (with supporting regulations from the Department of Education in Washington) mandated that an immigrant child study a single language: his or her native language. When a kindergarten student entered LAUSD, if the native language at home was determined to be Spanish, the student was designated Limited English Proficient (LEP) and put into classes that spoke only Spanish (the "bilingual" system was funded almost entirely for Spanish speakers, not, for instance, for Armenian or Korean speakers, per the theory that Hispanic kids cannot learn a new language as well as other ethnicities,stated explicitly by leading "bilingual" theorists. The LAUSD Bilingual Master Plan permitted English to be spoken thirty minutes a day- the English as a Second Language (ESL) component- but ESL could only be conversational English. No academic English was permitted at any time. All textbooks and academic instruction had to be in Spanish. Parents were told not to speak English at home, lest they confuse their children. An extremely difficult English exam was required to “re-designate” into English, and most kids could not pass this test until middle or high school, so that entire generations of Hispanic kids in California got no English instruction at all. Needless to say, English literacy skills plummeted and the Hispanic community is still recovering.

The political differences between 187 and 227 are clear. 187 would have thrown thousand of children out of school and into the streets. 227 gave immigrant children an important civil right: the right to learn the native language of their adoptive country.

Why did the state GOP not get behind the very popular 227 and the struggle against bilingual education? One problem was that no party leaders understood the issue, and leadership did not know it could effectively rebut the inevitable charges of "racism," "discrimination," etc.

Most Hispanic parents supported 227. Every Hispanic parent I talked to over 25 years in LAUSD was opposed to bilingual education. Parents wondered why their children could not start English instruction right away. Hispanic students as well did not understand the policy. Many Hispanic high school students asked me why they hadn’t been able to study English before 9th grade.

The state Democrats opposed 227, and the GOP should have moved in as an advocate for Hispanic education. Instead, the party was not up to the creative act of actually understanding a policy and acting accordingly. Today, even after 227's passage, millions of dollars are spent on classifying Spanish speakers, with special efforts to promote waivers to 227 so that students can be put back into Spanish only instruction. None of this is on GOP radar.

The same know-nothing (or know-it-all) approach to policy doomed George Romney’s recent presidential campaign. Romney’s advisors did not need to hear from activists in the field about Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards, a $10 billion piece of pork that will do nothing for schools, so Romney never attacked it. Even now in California, no GOP figure will criticize Governor Brown for supporting Common Core, at a cost of $2 billion, paid by California’s local school districts- money they don’t have (and Prop. 30 will not cover any of it).

No one should be surprised that a party with no intellectual leadership, no ability or desire to understand the political environment, has fallen on hard times. My message to Mr. Brulte and others who have challenged themselves to bring back the state party, is that they should start by promoting a culture in which policies are evaluated, not from their emotional impact, or the baggage attached to them by liberals, but by their political merit.
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Doug Lasken is a retired Los Angeles Unified teacher, freelancer and consultant. Write to him at doug.lasken@gmail.com.

“White” people

Thomas B. Edsall, writing in the New York Times (“The Persistence of Racial Resentment,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=139836&preview=true) relates that the GOP has won the “white” vote in every election except one going back to 1952 (the exception was LBJ in 1964). Edsall puts another spin on the current wisdom that the GOP needs more “ethnic” votes. He says that Romney lost, not because he lacked non-“white” votes, but because he only had 59% of the “white” vote, not the 62% he needed.

My focus here, though, is not on prescriptions for saving the GOP by getting more “whites” or “ethnics” into it, but on the nature of terms like “white,” “black” and “Hispanic,” and how they confuse our public dialogue. Let me start by explaining why I put such terms in quotes.

I first doubted my own officially designated ethnic status while filling out forms for the Los Angeles Unified Schools district during the course of my 25 years with them as a classroom teacher. The choices offered were “Hispanic,” “Black, “ “Asian-Pacific Islander,” “Native American,” and “Anglo.” “Anglo” was the only term that could remotely describe me, and it’s pretty remote.

You really could not pick a less descriptive term for me than “Anglo.” It’s short for “Anglo-Saxon,” a reference to the Germanic tribes that settled Britain after the Roman exodus. But in order for the term “Anglo” or “Anglo-Saxon” to make any historical sense, it should be “Anglo-Saxon-Norman,” to take into account the Norman invasion that created the modern English people and its language.

The problem for me is that, while everyone agrees that I’m “white,” I have no common ancestry with Angles, Saxons or Normans. Depending on what history you accept, I am either descended from an ancient Semitic tribe, or from a Turkish group called the Khazars, a nomadic and warlike nation that dominated the Russian plains until about 800AD, when it was defeated (along with the Slavs) by the Vikings who created modern Russia. To adapt to their new urban status, the theory goes, the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism, creating today’s Ashkenazi Jews.

Thus the term “white,” for me, has an ambiguous ethnic meaning, denoting some connection between Turkic and/or Semitic tribes and a number of Germanic tribes who have been separated from each other- if ever they were together- by thousands of years of culture and thousands of miles of geography.

We have other terms for “white,” like “Caucasian,” which derives from the late 18th century ideas of German academic Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed the "white" races originated in the general area of the Caucasus. That idea was soon debunked, but the term gained new life from another German, the philosopher Christoph Meiners, who, in 1785, coined the phrase “Caucasian race.” In Meiners’ classification, there were only two racial divisions: Caucasians and Mongolians. The Caucasians were, per Meiners, more attractive, having the “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin,” while the Mongolians, which then included Jews, were not attractive. Clearly I have little incentive to use a word like “Caucasian.”

Finally, there is the matter of the color white. I used to superimpose my forearm on a piece of white paper to show my inner-city students that I am not white. With my skin tone contrasted with actual white, it was clear that if I my skin were a crayon color, it would be tan. There are similar problems with the terms used to denote non-whites. Most “blacks,” having some white admixture, are not black colored. African blacks sometimes approach blackness, but clearly the approximate coloration is not reliable.

The term “Afro-American” has some legitimacy, but it begs the question of everyone else: all Americans are hyphenated from somewhere. I, for instance, might be a Ukrainian-Jewish-American. “Afro-American,” in this light, seems overly precise and cumbersome. It’s usage, furthermore, is unreliable. President Obama, for instance, is considered “black” or “Afro-American,” but, as he is 50% “white," he could as easily be considered “white.“ It’s arbitrary.

L.A. Unified forms also provide employees the option to be “Hispanic,” which, for reasons that escape me, is thought to be more descriptive than “Latino,” or is it the other way around? Sorry, I don’t mean to be flippant, but I really can’t remember what the difference is supposed to be, and neither term makes much sense anyway. “Latino” references the Latin peoples who inhabit southern Europe in the areas once near and dominated by the Roman Empire. This includes Italian and French speakers. It also includes, in a sense, the Norman invaders of England, Vikings who had adopted French as their language, thus bringing Latin into the English language. A more confusing term for Mexican or South or Central American than “Latino” you could not find.

“Hispanic,” a reference to the Spanish colonizers, is equally meaningless, as it does not take into account the Indian admixture. This omission creates a stark and confusing contrast with “Native Americans,” many of whom have Hispanic ancestry.

Equally nonsensical is the term “minorities” to denote “black” or “Hispanic” people. The terms “majority” and “minority” are relative and rapidly becoming meaningless. I’m Jewish, which places me in one of the tiniest minorities around, but I’m white, which makes me a “majority.” "Hispanics" are about to be a literal majority. We’ll see if that’s enough to change the usage.

More egregious still are terms like “ethnic” and “people of color” to denote "blacks" and "Hispanics." “Ethnic,” of course, is a “real word,” meaning, “of or relating to a population sub-group, within a larger or dominant national or cultural group” (Miriam-Webster). Now that’s what I call a definition, and it clearly has nothing to do with being specifically black or Hispanic.

I have a special problem with “people of color.” As noted above, I am tan, which is of course a color. In fact, white is a color. “People of color” is an insulting phrase, implying a missing element in “whites,” and as such it is racist.

Ok, so none of the existing terms is valid. Does that mean there’s no such thing as race, or ethnicity? Clearly it does not mean that. I am from a distinct cultural group, with identifying characteristics, many of them racial, and so is everyone else.

Since we are different in racial ways, we do need rational terms for the differences, though I don’t know what they would be, or how we would agree on them. There is so much “agenda” in racial terminology that it’s almost impossible to agree on anything. For instance, a common paradigm for “blacks” and “Hispanics” is the idea that “whites” do not know hardship, that only “blacks” and “Hispanics” have been kicked around and abused. As a “white,” I am supposed to live a charmed and carefree life, but as it happens, both sides of my family fled Eastern Europe and Russia, barely escaping with their lives (my father’s grandfather was cut down in front of his family by Cossacks). They arrived in the United States speaking no English and having no money, and my family is still recovering. I believe it’s bad taste to dwell on your hardships, but I feel compelled to do so after 25 years of L.A. Unified’s mantra that my ancestors, my family and future generations of my family, because they are "white," are lucky and advantaged in some absolute sense. That is a racist and counterproductive concept.

While I’m not holding my breath for new and rational ethnic terms, I do think we should start viewing our leaders in non-racial ways. In Los Angeles we made much of our first Hispanic mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa (now termed out). He’s done some things well and other things not so well, but what does his evaluation have to do with his ethnicity? I say, who cares about it? And who cares if his successor is the first black, female, Jewish mayor (a possibility)? What kind of nonsense is this?

Our unbalanced focus on a leader’s ethnicity has gone to loony extremes with President Obama, who generated wild excitement in 2008 for being the first “black” president. If ever there was an ill-advised approach to assessing a president, ethnicity is it. I oppose Obama’s education policies, which are mostly pork and badly thought out, while I support his efforts on gun control. What do those issues have to do with Obama’s being “white” or “black”?

I’ll close with the thoughts of UCLA anthropologist and popular writer Jared Diamond, who posits that races came about as sexual selection groups. People bred with others who had the same secondary sexual characteristics (hair, eye and skin color, etc.) as a way to create distinct human cultures, with distinct skills and approaches to life. If that’s the case, what are we supposed to do now in America? The liberal commitment to forcing sexually active teenagers from divergent ethnic groups into the same high schools, as an end in itself, is clearly lacking in terms of Diamond’s formulation. At my high school, integrated in the '60's and '70's through mandatory busing, the lunch area was as segregated as Selma, Alabama in the ‘50’s, and it remains that way. To make any policy sense, given Diamond’s origin of race, integration should lead to interbreeding- the creation of new races. Try tacking that on to the Democratic platform!

Race is the unthinkable, the explosive topic. We have studiously avoided it, but we’d better figure it out pretty soon if we want a viable society in the coming age, or, come to think of it, if we want a credible two-party system in 2016.