Monday, July 29, 2013

My readers are vampires

Yesterday, with the help of my tech-savvy son-in-law, I explored Google Bloggspot "stats" to see how my new readership is doing and to my shock discovered that 90% of my "hits" originate from a single website: vampirestat.com, which is a site that tracks search trends for vampires. Imagine how I felt- learning that almost all my readers are vampires! I have little choice but to reach out to them as the prime supporters of my blog. Vampires are fascinating, after all. How couldn't they be? At a time when "civilization" is dragging us into the muck, vampires represent a human branch that left us- just as we left the gibbering chimps- to evolve into an alternative humanhood. Anyway, to promote my blog and justify my belief that I have something intensely important to say, I have resolved to write for this audience, these vampires, who have apparently found in my ideas some affinity with their own philosophical searching. I know a bit about vampires, having studied them for years. I know they hate paragraphs, and never use them. They are at ease with small fonts, finding larger fonts, given their excellent eyesight, insulting, though they are fond of bold. I have sought to accomodate these preferences here. Popular culture and media give us some insight into vampire life. Bram Stoker and Anne Rice portray the vampire association with decayed gentry or aristocracy. The Twilight series brings us the vampire pathos of isolation, though the books are flawed with the incessant iteration of teenagers' first love- a common pitfall in the Young Adult genre, and not particularly germane to the vampire experience (vampires do not develop their sexual organs until the age of thirty- more on that later). But popular culture and media do not work towards a full view of vampires or anything else, the primary goal in the media's case being to keep your attention long enough for you to learn how white your sheets can be. I accept the fragments of reality scattered through the media, but I found years ago that I could study first-hand any number of allegedly supernatural and/or non-existent things just by paying attention. I have communicated with vampires (and have also had rather hasty encounters with werewolves, witches and wizards). Of course, vampires look entirely human, and are, in certain senses, human. It's a Jungian thing, as many things are. Back to history: After the chimps retreated from us, numbed and awed by our dangerous and inscrutable powers, we reached another bifurcation. One direction led to the submission of the animal soul- first to village life and then large cities- via what we call "civilization," which can be defined as, "A system that keeps coherent the overall efficiencies of community- even while the individuals in that community seek non communal ends." The vampires were appalled at what they saw as subjugation of basic individuality and free-will, and with the loss of "natural" environments suited to an organism's nature that all earthly life-forms other than ours take as a sine qua non in biology's covenant with existence. Vampires were after all aristocrats, and that's how aristocrats think. So they gravitated towards an "alternative" humanhood, and then…never saw what hit them. They hadn't known that proto-humans were obsessed with exterminating any and all primate cousins- first, second or twice removed- who sought another way, even the highway. Some vampires avoided extinction by accepting the bonds of "civilization," and found their strongest appetites and desires forever thwarted. And I'm not talking about the desire to bite people and suck their blood- that was just part of it (and not an issue with all vampires). This is where it gets Jungian. The vampire appetites I'm talking about served a desire for actual presence in the world, for contact with others of one’s kind. Humans do not engage in close contact with one another. They can’t because they are in the enforced confinement of civilization, and you never know when some emotional revelation will upset the apple cart and slow sales of detergent. The vampires are with us in our Jungian communal dreams. Welcome to my blog, you of vampirestat.com and whoever else you are. I look forward to writing about our shared goals and worlds. I also invite vampires, scholars and seekers to write me and encourage my efforts. Let me know which aspects of vampire life you’d like to hear more about. Regarding the sexual practices of vampires, I will not write of that unless requested, and will not be responsible for any ensuing upset or panic. Please send requests to doug.lasken@gmail.com or comment below.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Lasken FlashReport post: Bilingual ed. & the CA GOP

[Reposted from FlashReport, March 7, 2013. This piece makes clear why my party affiliation today is "decline to state."]


CA GOP NEEDS SENSIBLE HISPANIC OUTREACH

By Doug Lasken

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 timely. 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 continue to vote Democratic in spite of ill-considered policy promoted by party allies. The state GOP would 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 public 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 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 offered almost entirely to 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, a theory 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 real-life 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 common language of their adopted 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. After I became a high school teacher in 1999, many Hispanic high school students asked me why they hadn’t been able to study English before 9th grade.  227 had come too late for them.

The state Democrats opposed 227, and the GOP should have moved in as an advocate for Hispanic education, but the party, which had been scorched by 187, was not up to the creative act of learning about an education policy (from anyone other than a publisher's rep) 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 presidential campaign. Romney’s advisors saw no need to understand Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core Standards- a $10 billion piece of pork that will do nothing for schools outside the South (where academic standards were low and needed to be replaced)- so Romney never attacked Common Core, except to claim, incorrectly, that it is bad because the federal government will pay for it (the states pay).  Even now in California, no GOP figure will criticize Governor Brown for supporting Common Core, which will cost the state $2 billion, paid by Brown's Proposition 30 (in other words, by us).  Common Core offers the perfect formula for a GOP issue: Big Publishing sets the agenda for public education, a conflict of interest of epic proportions.  But it is not on the GOP's radar.

No one should be surprised that a party with no intellectual leadership, no ability or desire to understand a changing political and cultural 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 for their emotional impact, or the baggage attached to them by liberals, but by their real-life 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.

Postscript, May 8, 2018: In September, 2016, the implementation of Common Core in California and the replacement of the state's previous standardized tests with new tests aligned with Common Core - rushed for political and financial reasons- resulted in a meltdown of testing and instruction from which California school districts are still recovering.  Yet the state GOP remains mute on the subject.  They don't want to win, it seems, which is why Donald Trump was able to pick-up the party for a bargain basement price.  

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Salton Sea


I hadn’t been to the Salton Sea (about forty miles southeast of Palm Springs) for fifty years, not since my parents bought a homesteading parcel south of Thermal on the west shore. We camped out on that parcel in the early 60’s, feeling a vague sense of ownership over the little piece of scruffy desert about a mile up from the Sea.  In the morning I encountered a gila monster near where I had slept, who looked at me with the same standoffishness I felt as I looked at him.  I had thought my father had lost the title by letting the homesteading requirements lapse, but after his death I found in his effects a recent property detail report showing an address in Thermal. Apparently he had fulfilled the requirements of homesteading by putting up a few basic structures and had retained title. Equipped with the report showing a street address in Thermal, my wife and I set out on a quest.

Thermal, as it turns out, is the perfect place to say “There’s no there there,” as in this case it is literally true: There are no signs near or in Thermal saying that Thermal is approaching or that you are in it. A bit south of Coachella, which does exist, we started to wonder where Thermal might be. Stopping at a gas station/diner next to a small park, I was informed by a gas customer that this was Thermal, a place whose name is widely known in California apparently, not because it exists, but because the area around where it is said to exist is often the hottest in the continental US, sometimes beating Death Valley.

We were saved from the confusion by GPS, which informed us that the address we sought was thirty miles south. So we set off, passing Salton City, a community of trailers and modest homes which goes down almost to the beach. Strangely, neither this nor other settlements we saw around the Sea had constructed homes down to the water’s edge, as other shoreline communities do to connect with the body of water that gives them identity. More on this shortly.

A bit south of Salton City, our GPS directed us to turn left into a neighborhood with no apparent name. There were streets that had not existed the last time I visited, and some homes with addresses. We had to approximate the plot’s location using other houses, as nothing had been built on our plot, and there was no address on the curb. Aside from the sporadic houses, the land is the same piece of desert sand and scrub it was when we camped there. Regarding property values in the area, many of the homes featured signs saying, “$99 down! Everyone qualifies!” There were no people walking around anywhere, though a car drove by with several older men looking, it seemed, for something to do.

Our quest was technically at an end, but we had a day to kill so we decided to drive around the Sea. It’s really a lake, created by various sources such as river flooding and agricultural run-off. The lake-bed features the second lowest elevation in the U.S., after Death Valley, and it lies atop the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Several other significant faults cross the area. It is thought by some geologists that the “big one” will originate with a 7 or 8 point quake beneath the Salton Sea, then reverberate up the state. On the brighter side, the area’s isolation and the lack of development has allowed the Sea to develop into a major stop for migratory birds.

The west shore is too cluttered to be beautiful, and the view across the lake seemed psychologically blocked. Down at the southern end, I can't say we got too excited traversing a trucking nexus called Brawley. But things changed suddenly on the east shore. A steeply undulating and largely unblemished bajada rolled down from the eastern mountains- which we traversed on Highway 111- and the Sea to the west looked otherworldly and strikingly beautiful.

There were no trails or accommodations for tourists to get to the shore, which lay a mile or so from the highway- the anomaly we had noticed before. We finally came to a community with roads that promised to give access to the beach. We headed in, past old and largely neglected homes and a few businesses (still no people in sight), but the beach was blocked by a large berm. There was a ruined wooden stairway going up the berm that rose out of a pool of muddy water, and this perhaps at one time led over the berm to the beach.

Continuing north on the highway we came in a few minutes to a nature preserve with trails leading from the empty parking lot down to the beach. On the beach we discovered that what we thought was sand was actually vast tons of crushed shells, a sort of marine graveyard. Coming closer to the waterline we encountered an endless vista of rotting fish carcasses, emitting the sort of reek you would expect (the smell often reaches L.A., especially when the wind roils the fetid muck from the 30 foot lake depths). There are bird die-offs too- from erratic salinity and pollution- though we saw no bird casualties that day.

The shells and fish skeletons were crunchy underfoot. Walking slowly over them towards the deserted beach felt like entering a Bosch painting of hell on earth- a wasted battlefield of death. Along the waterline regularly posted signs warned against swimming ("No lifeguard"), and across the water there were no boats. But something strange happened to the forbidding scene when I stood at the water's edge. Looking up I saw a vast calm lake, troubled only by tiny ripples, and across the lake I saw desert and small human communities, and beyond that a mountain range, and in the sky were the sun and wheeling flocks of birds, including many pelicans, who also floated majestically on the water, and I was hit with the full impact of it. Maybe I also felt the interlacing of the fault lines below, not their tension- not the grinding overwhelming pressure we imagine between tectonic plates- but a sort of peaceful overlay of borders, like a beach, where the sea lays atop the land as if it loves it. The stench of dead fish did not abate, nor did the morbid spectacle of their array, yet, for a few moments, I took in an image of peace and beauty to rival any I’d seen.

What does it mean? Is the Salton Sea beautiful in spite of its dead fish and secret-formula water? Or is it beautiful because this is a place where earth and space connect, where life and death occur, where nature’s pollution rivals ours?

ISIS: A virtual reality

[ This piece is reposted from 4/9/22, updated in the context of Israel vs. Hamas and Ukraine vs. Russia, with reference to the recent ISI...