One sin too many

One sin too many

tipped the scales,

mortality, not life

prevails.

For Eve, you know

just couldn't wait,

her female hunger

hard to sate.

The serpent eyed her

thinking how

he'd transfer all his weakness now:

The weakness of not wanting much

the weakness of

his cold dark touch.

Take this, he hissed,

God won't be pissed;

the obedient creature

is not missed.

Eve was not sure

and for a while

thought this is naughty,

not my style.

But then she thought

our life is hard in

this infernally pleasant

garden;

God must know

that stories need

a conflict

for the mind to heed.

Thus did the serpent

choose most fit

she who knew

before she bit

The fleshy fruit

raised to her jaw,

the story is our god's,

she saw.

And Adam

more prone to be led

saw the truth of what she said.

Swallowing hard

he looked about

in mortal fear

he turned to shout:

"Oh no! We're in

the story line,

we'll have to be interesting,

not devine!"

Creation's ratings, now assured,

though we'd rather not have any.

We wonder, should we have demurred

before one sin too many?

Am I White?

I. Terms

People who see me tell me that I’m "white," but I hesitate to feel the "white" guilt that many sponsor.  The hesitation comes from two sources: our muddled definition of “white,” and the life experiences of my family and me.

Our society has never used the term “white” with a proper definition.  “Caucasian,” the previous term of choice, has proven nonsensical, so much so that its usage has been largely dropped by agencies such as school districts that keep track of employee and student ethnicities. The concept of Caucasian people derived from the late 18th century German academic Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed the "white" races originated in the general area of the Caucasus Mountains. That idea was 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 included Jews, were not attractive. Clearly, as a Jew, I have little incentive to use the term “Caucasian.”

Unfortunately, the term that replaced “Caucasian” is “Anglo." For over 30 years I have designated myself Anglo on forms for the Los Angeles Unified School District, though it is as meaningless as “Caucasian."  You really could not pick a less descriptive term for “white” than “Anglo," short for “Anglo-Saxon,” a reference to the Germanic tribes that settled in Britain after the Roman exodus. Firstly, in order for the term “Anglo” or “Anglo-Saxon” to make historical sense, it should be “Anglo-Saxon-Norman,” to take into account the Norman (i.e. French speaking) Viking invasion that created the modern English people and its language.

The specific problem for me is that, while everyone agrees that I’m “white,” I have no common ancestry with Angles, Saxons or Normans. Depending on which history you accept, as an Ashkenazi Jew I am either descended from an ancient Semitic tribe or from a Turkic group called the Khazars, a nomadic and warlike nation that dominated the Russian plains until about 800 AD, when it was weakened (along with the Slavs) by the Mongols, then destroyed by the Vikings who created modern Russia- contrasted with Sephardic Jews, a more provably Semitic people, many of whom migrated through North Africa and Spain, and who are no more related to "Anglos" than the Ashkenazi.

With both common terms for “white” - “Caucasian” and “Anglo” - virtually meaningless, there is not much to go on but the color white, but that is of limited help since “white” people are not the color white, any more than “red,” black” or “brown” people are those colors.  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 my skin were a crayon color, it would be tan.

II. White guilt, special privilege and oppression

So much for the blanket definition of “white.”  The question now becomes, whatever kind of white person I may be, have I or my ancestors oppressed and harmed other races in heinous ways, and have we, as "white" people, been the benefiary of special privileges because we are "white"?   I don’t have any information previous to my grandparents and some great-grandparents, but from what I know of my family history, I’m not seeing much oppression of anyone, or race based privilege.  Both sides of my family fled for their lives from Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania in the late 19^th Century.   America was a promised land indeed, but not in an easy way.  My paternal grandfather, who came to New York City poor and speaking no English, worked for a while in a sweat shop, then made his way to Bismarck, North Dakota where he opened a successful store.  To my knowledge, no special privileges or slaves were involved.  The local KKK burned a cross in front of the Lasken Building (my dad, watching the crowd from the second floor where the family slept, recognized the chief of police as the husband of his second grade teacher).  Neither my grandparents nor my parents could join Bismarck's country club.  

My father became a pharmacist and we moved to Los Angeles when I was two years old.  Most pharmacy chains would not hire Jews.  A notable exception was Thrifty Drug Stores, where my dad worked throughout my childhood for $1.98 an hour.  He later used his knowledge of Thrifty’s exorbitant prescription prices to open the first discount pharmacy in L.A.  He made money, but, again, no privilege or slaves were involved, other than wage slaves (who got respectable union pay), and they were every color.

In 1972, when I received a BA in English literature from the University of Minnesota, I went to see the chair of the English department to enquire about graduate school.  A distinctly unfriendly man told me that there was “no room” in the English department for me.  I later learned that the ‘70’s were the tail end of the practice of Midwestern university English departments to exclude Jews.  (I’m not very bitter about it; the fallout from this exclusion has been that I got to teach inner-city elementary kids to read and high school kids to read more, rather than toss all my work to TA’s and wear elbow patches).

I thought about administration and got a master’s degree in educational administration, but received intense hostility from the district when I tried to move into administration.  I was told by a principal, in a moment of candor, that I was the wrong color for administration.  The message was futher clarified by a Hispanic coordinator at an East L.A. meeting who told me I should not take a walk alone in the neighborhood because, not only was I white, but I was a particular kind of White who looked “really white,” so walking alone might not be safe for me (I did walk alone and felt perfectly safe). If the L.A. district had been rational about race it would have included in its mandates a message that people who look "really white" are not necessarily descended from slave owners or people who were comfortable in a world that accepted slavery. As it happened, the district, years later, headed its Critical Race Theory curriculum "Challenging Whiteness."

III. Does it matter?

There are enough reasonable people around of all races that I don’t worry about being misunderstood in intelligent circles.  The broader problem is that our national politics is increasingly racial (for want of other substance), with the 2016 presidential race presented as a struggle between a "white" party, the Republicans, versus the Democratic Party, a coalition of races in agreement on "white" guilt.  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 writes that Mitt Romney lost the GOP ticket in 2012, not because he lacked non-“white” votes, but because he only had 59% of the “white” vote, not the 62% he needed. Were this translated into campaign advice for Romney, it would be that he should have done more to get the "white" vote. But how would he have done that? And what does "white vote" even mean?

The 2016 presidential campaign promises to be a font of confusion regarding ethnic politics.  The “white” vote as defined above, by virtue of its link with Republicans and the Tea Party, presents itself as retrograde, bigoted and ignorant, as well as Midwestern and Southern.  What are the options for a “white” person living in, say, Los Angeles, who does not want to be represented in this way?  The standard option would be to join the Democrats, but that does not work for me because I regard the Democratic Party as shamelessly corrupt, both in its pork-driven and harmful education policies and its reincarnation as the party of war.

Thus I believe it’s time for everyone to stop obsessing about our ethnicities.  We’re all in the same boat, anyway: every race is about to be threatened by the biological sciences, which are on the verge of creating new types of humans to replace us.  2016 should be the year of realistic assessment of the prospects for all humanity, not a rehash of our imperfect history so far.

Mystical kicks on Route 66

Our driving trip the first week of 2015, like our last to Havasu City, took my wife and me into the Southwest, this time as far as Sante Fe, New Mexico.  Our itinerary paralleled old Route 66, the romanticized predecessor of the Interstate Highway System, surviving stretches of which feature commercial clusters which promise and often deliver nostalgic glimpses of early automotive America.  This trip was different from our Havasu getaway in another respect: We did not get away from the world, but were immersed in it by the car radio and our mobile devices as word of the French massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher deli invaded our space and seemed to stain even the open deserts.  

Our first stop, Williams, Arizona, where we stayed at the Railway Hotel and took the delightful old narrow gauge train to the Grand Canyon, occurred before the awful news, so we could relax and enjoy the Americana.  The train was built when there were no drivable roads leading to the canyon and was taken by many notables in the 1920’s, including movie stars and presidents.  It chugged along for two hours each way, past beautiful snowy terrain. 

At the canyon, after some minutes staring into the seeming endless depths, it seemed to me that, thanks to the Colorado River, one can look into private parts of the earth.  The guide explained that it is a common misperception that the river cut into a motionless plain; in fact the plain rose as part of the Colorado Plateau, the river just keeping level.  The result in any case is an assault on the earth’s integrity, allowing the viewer to look where we normally can’t look.  I wondered if the earth was in pain from this violation.  Or was it a sexual penetration?  Is the earth ravished here, in the throes of rapture from the river’s thrust?  When such thoughts come over me I take a cautionary moment to think of the scorn a geologist might have for them.  The earth alive?  Native Americans were allowed to think that, but we are not, as the dogma of our state religion, Science, has it that matter is a random chaos of unconscious reaction.  Our one permitted mystical focus, which we call “God,” is not matter, but spirit, guiding us in our manipulation of matter.  Our drive to colonize the extra-terrestrial universe is a crusade to force all matter to conform to our will.  Such, anyway, were my thoughts at the Grand Canyon.   

The next day we toured Meteor Crater, Az., a wonderful gigantic dent in the earth, surrounded to the horizon by the Colorado Plateau, dated to a meteor collision about 50,000 years ago.  The crater and visitor center are privately owned by the descendants of a man who staked a mining claim here and dug several hundred feet below the crater floor in the mistaken belief that a mass of extraterrestrial iron that he could sell to the railroads was buried there.  In fact the nickel-iron mass had disintegrated on impact into myriad small particles which lay everywhere around the site.  The largest intact piece of the meteor, about two feet long, is in the visitor center.  I touched it eagerly, wondering what far away mind, what “other”, I might be in contact with, again, obviously, deviating from the state religion, where iron and nickel atoms are “materials,” in effect dead things (sadly, I felt nothing). 

On the tour of the rim I had forgotten my water bottle and the guide suggested I eat snow.  I did and it was delicious, and I wondered if any of the dispersed iron atoms were in the snow.  Could it be that I would metabolize pieces from “outer-space,” that they would become part of me?  Looking down into the crater I again had the thought that something sexual had occurred.  Was the earth fucked here?  If so, perhaps there was a resonance in the ground beneath my feet, detectable even in the snow I was eating.  And I thought, not for the first time, that it’s a good thing our state religion does not have an Inquisition (at least not a formal one).

At about this time the news of the Charlie Hebdo attack broke, followed soon after by news of the kosher deli attack, and our trip from then on was not, strictly speaking, a vacation, in the etymological sense of a vacated mind, though we found some escape our first night in Santa Fe.  We arrived late.  It was cold and dark; most stores and restaurants around the historic city center were closed.  Luckily we found that the Hotel La Fonda’s restaurant was not only open but featured a lively country band and a group of people who had been dancing there for 35 years (per our waitress, who seated us close to the band).  Several of the dancing couples were quite expert, one in particular whose precision moves looked professional, so, although we love dancing, we felt a certain hesitation to join in.  The first martini took care of that (we learned the next day that, at 7,000 feet, the effects of alcohol in Santa Fe are notably enhanced), and we danced through a number of songs (the regulars were quite tolerant of our lurching about, for which we were grateful).

The next day we took a walking tour of the city, our initial mood somewhat dour, both because of the aftereffects of our revelries the night before and the deepening horror on the news.  But that news proved to be an engaging backdrop to the tour.  Santa Fe is one of those cities where history informs everything.  It embodies the living memory of Native Americans, the Spanish Conquest, the Catholic Church, the Mexican period, the early American period, and something else we did not know about.  The guide took us into a sprawling 19^th Century hacienda, through room after room added over the years, and in the furthest room was the former office of Robert Oppenheimer, where he met, towards the end of World War II, with other people with familiar names, like Edward Teller, as these men, engaged in the Manhattan Project, oversaw the invention of the atom bomb and its first detonation in the nearby desert.  Touching the preserved objects on Oppenheimer’s desk, I thought of the atom, and again my heresy was aroused, probably more so in the context of events unfolding in France.  What is an atom?  It comes from the Greek, meaning, “that which cannot be cut,” but of course we have cut it.  What does that mean, to “cut” an atom?  We have split it into “sub-atomic” particles, an oxymoron in the etymological sense, although, as if attempting to make semantic amends, science journals often assert that within the atom we've found new “basic building blocks” which cannot be cut, like quarks, or whatever particle we have not cut yet. 

We’ve found that when we cut an atom, a burst of something we call “energy” emerges.  This energy can be used to do things, like heat cities or incinerate hundreds of thousands of people.  The latter is what Oppenheimer et al had in mind. 

But what is an atom?  To find out, we hurl them at great speeds at each other, causing collisions that rip apart their structure so that tiny components spill out.  In my blasphemy, I consider that a strange way to find out what an atom is.  What if you were an advanced being from another galaxy and you wondered what people were?  You note that they move excitedly over the planet, changing everything, often rubbing against each other, activity that apparently produces more of them.  To further your understanding of people-particles, you deem it necessary to hurl them against each other, ripping apart their structure so that their components fly out.  That does not seem a likely scenario, as an advanced being would probably figure that nothing much would be learned about people that way.  I guess what I’m saying is, we’re not advanced.

After the first atom bomb was detonated in New Mexico in 1945, Oppenheimer is said to have quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  That occurred to me as we walked out into the cold sun in the courtyard.  What underlying phenomenon is happening in France, and almost everywhere in the world?  Are we becoming Death?  Does our state religion of dead matter mask a religion of murder and suicide?

Fortunately we had a few more kicks on Route 66 to revive the sense of carefree getaway, like a stop in Winslow, Arizona, where we sought coffee and parked at random on a corner memorializing the Eagle’s song, “Take it Easy.”  The corner store featured a plaster statue of a young dude flashing a smile and waving across the street at a permanently parked flatbed Ford, a plaster girl at the wheel.  Above the statue was a sign reading “Route 66."  While Susan checked the stores, I wandered down from the Ford, finding a gap between buildings featuring a lonely hut,  big enough for one person to stand in, with a wooden sign reading, "World's Smallest Church! Come in and Pray!"  I went in and closed my eyes, hearing only the cars on Route 66, and I saw everything that had attached to my ego since I was one year old suddenly stripped away, as by a tornado or an atom bomb, and from everyone around me and the culture of the whole world, a vast layer was stripped away, and we were all souls, basic building blocks of consciousness.  I jumped out after a few seconds, wondering what spirits I had disturbed here.  I looked over to the plaster girl in the flatbed Ford for an answer, but she gave none.

Through the long and rainy deserts on the final stretch from Phoenix to L.A., we heard that the male French terrorists (one female escaped) had been killed.  I spent the hours navigating the deserts and L.A.’s freeways wondering if there was any logic to feeling good that these men were dead.  I think everyone would agree that those deaths do not represent the end of something, but a mere beginning in our religious quest to become death, destroyer of worlds.  

We gave thanks to the Southwest, and Route 66, and the earth as it expresses itself here, for providing a backdrop to our thoughts and mysterious lives.

Havasu getaway

My wife and I fell into three free nights at a time-share in Havasu City, a sprawling collection of townhouses and malls on a gentle bajada leading down to the Arizona  (eastern) shore of Lake Havasu, which straddles the southern California/Arizona border.

It was good just to experience again the California deserts.  I used to argue with my dad about whether there would be room on the planet for all the world's people.  I thought there would not, but my dad pointed to the big empty deserts of the west and said there would be plenty of room for new cities.  He was proven partially right, as two major cities, Palmdale and Lancaster, popped up in later years in the desert north of L.A. (they look like Havasu City except flat and without a lake).

On Pearblossom Highway, heading east into the still vast and empty desert, my dad seemed further vindicated.  You could build dozens of Palmdales and Lancasters in these deserts, but today I would ask my dad, "Do you want to cover the planet with townhouses, franchise restaurants and malls?"  Just to spar with me, he might have answered, "Yes."

My dad and I would have argued about Havasu City.  I would have moaned from the back seat that it was ugly.  On this trip Susan and I arrived at sunset- a beautiful red splash across the desert horizon- and in the foreground RV lots, warehouses, high tension wires, stray Taco Bells and Burger Kings, and finally malls, Denny's, Starbucks, Chili's and thousands of townhouses.

I'm older now than my dad was when we had those arguments, and I've accepted certain things, for instance, the importance of comfort.  It didn't take long for me to love our Havasu time-share, with its king bed and big plump pillows.  The two mile walk to the nearest mall was aided by wonderful air, warm and cool at the same time, somehow buoyant, as if you were swimming in it. Beautiful desert canyons are everywhere around the city, with isolated trails that go for miles.  The old downtown, where we watched the Veteran's Day parade, has a lot of charm and character, as did the parade.  Not a bad retirement spot, really.  I must channel the 14 year old me and tell him to dull some of his sharp edges.

The history of Havasu is poignant.  It was the last refuge of the Chemehuevi tribe. Their name might mean, "people who play with fish," or it might mean, "nose in the air like a roadrunner." As the meaning of their name is forgotten, so they are largely forgotten, except in Havasu City by the lake, in the waiting room for the ferry that takes you to the California side and the Indian casino.  On our visit most of the passengers waited outside, but I wanted the air conditioning in the waiting room. Inside, several teenagers were enjoying an adult free atmosphere.  I noticed a series of posters around the room that told the story of a Native American tribe.  A boy and girl were horsing around by the first poster, so I had to nudge towards them until they moved aside.  I read that the Chemehuevi were nomadic hunters and gatherers.  Their ancestral territory covered thousand of square miles from the San Gabriel Mountains, through Nevada and Arizona. They liked to take long trips in small groups, but sometimes men traveled long distances alone.  They were an inquisitive people who "liked to visit all tribes, whether friends or enemies; to speak strange tongues, sing strange songs, and marry strange wives."

They were not particular to the Havasu area, but were hemmed in by European settlement and, at times, hostile Mojave Indians.  Early in the 20th Century a Chemehuevi reservation was created at the low point in the Havasu Valley, no doubt chosen because of frequent flooding.  At this time there were only a few hundred Chemehuevi left.  In the 1930's, Parker Dam, built to supply water to L.A. from the Colorado River, created Lake Havasu, at the bottom of which are the remains of the Chemehuevi reservation.  To make amends, the tribe was offered land on the western shore, which, as it happened, was traditional enemy territory for them.  At this point most members left, or married out of the tribe. Some of the bloodline were able to establish the casino, and these remnants of the tribe, although they no longer command the deserts and mountains (or possibly the strange wives) receive boatloads of money.

Is this a happy ending?  It depends on how you look at it.  Certainly the story entails the death of a culture, which is an all-American story.  When my grandfather left Ukraine around 1900, he left a culture that had existed for over a thousand years.  That culture is now gone, though people who were formed by it live on.  Just about every American can say something like that.  We are all Chemehuevi, with our village at the bottom of a man-made lake.

Havasu City is not a great city.  There are no central areas for people to interact- unless you count Starbucks- and little in the way of arresting architecture.  But Havasu City does have the desert, the river, the big sky, the mountains, canyons, friendly people and the spirit of the Chemehuevi.  When you think about it, that's a lot.

$6.99 is too much to pay Time-Warner for a rental

That's what I'm sweating in my living room tonight- I've got the house to myself and I'm looking at this potentially interesting movie but when I see it costs $6.99 I get upset. On the one hand I could spend the evening pondering all the ways we're soon to go extinct: nuclear war, bioterror, climate change, the genetic engineering of our replacements, boredom, anger- but none of this tonight, at least for me, is able to compete with my rage at Time-Warner for charging $6.99 for a movie I don't even know if I'll like. What does it mean, this preference for the passing peeve over the great DOOM? Does it mean that the truth is so sickeningly awful that we can't actually think about it for very long, or....stay with me here...is it because, just maybe, it really is terrible that Time-Warner would charge, well, anything to rent a movie. I already paid the bastards, now they want more for this over-hyped stuff? Before going any further I want to mention- what the reader may well have noted- that I'm using a standard s.o.c. (stream of consciousness) style, and also that I've decided to write, for now, without paragraphs. This last might sound odd from a former English teacher who enforced on generations the solemn duty to write in paragraphs, but it's just the way I feel. I realized I don't always have to give the reader such a blatant signal that I've shifted focus. You, the current reader, can tell already when I shift focus, can't you? Not that I claim to be doing this as a great artist would. As, for instance, Cormac McCarthy did when he stopped using quotation marks, and then he stopped describing his characters' physical selves. The difference between me and McCarthy is that he never said, "Hey, look, I stopped using quotation marks," while I felt the need to announce my experiment, as if in fear of reprimand for breaking rules. That's what happens when you give up fiction and sign-on for the literal, where rules are rules. And when you retire from English teaching, you say to your former students, "Consider this: you have to know about paragraphs before you can stop using them." You have to know about anything to stop doing it, otherwise you don't know what you stopped doing, or why you stopped. This gives an insight into original sin. It's said that we don't have to have bitten the forbidden fruit ourselves to have, more or less, virtually bitten it, and to decide, again, not to bite it. But, as noted, you can't stop doing something unless you are first doing it. The resolution, I think, is that we bite the apple when we first achieve consciousness. Then we see ourselves, what we are made of, our appetites, our actions. Then we see other people, and note similar patterns. Not only does the apple not fall far from the tree, it grows on the tree. In the Wizard of Oz when the apple trees, under the influence of a witch, pick their own apples and throw them at Dorothy et al, they are throwing knowledge at them, packets of understanding that the innocent travelers are not ready for, one of many assaults during their quest that lead Dorothy to choose the drab plains of Kansas over the sensuality and vivid life of Oz...to choose Auntie Em over the Wicked Witch. I'd like to see a movie about that...but not for $6.99!

If I could write....

...I would write about an older guy who, at his wife’s behest, cleans out his closet of items that can go to Goodwill, but as he takes long un-worn garments off the rack and gazes at them, opening unaccustomed windows of memory, he is overcome with emotion.

…I would write about the same guy doing the same thing with his old clothes a week later and not giving a shit.

…I would write a story about how last week an asteroid struck the earth and destroyed it, but we don’t know because we're an afterglow.

…I would write about a man who suddenly discovers that he has aged.

…I would write about a young man who wishes he were older.

…I would write about a man who wonders what it would be like to be a woman. Would it be easier, more powerful?

…I would write about a woman who wonders what it would be like to be a man. Would it be easier, more powerful?

…I would write about tardigrades, animals the size of pinheads who live everywhere on earth, in space and at the bottom of the oceans, and all over our bodies.

…I would write about what would happen if you tried to kiss a tardigrade (it would eat your face).

…I would write about a man who inherits his son’s dog when his son goes away to college. This man only liked cats, but now he has a dog.

…I would write about the same man with the dog, who realizes that he loves the dog but would rather have a cat. “What are the ethics of this?” the man wonders.

...I would write about a high school English teacher who, for years, wondered, “Is there value to what I teach? Will this 14 year old boy who wiggles in class and dreams of freedom on the bonny green be nurtured and guided through the modern age by Great Expectations”?  “Why not?”, the man concludes, “It’s as good as anything else.”

...I would write about the same high school teacher thinking about the earlier years when he taught elementary school. “Am I as useful now as I was then,” he wonders, “I taught kids to read and do arithmetic. Now what do I teach them?” The man answers his own question: “I teach them what it’s like to be 70 years old.”

...I would write about a man who wanted to be a novelist and one day he has an idea about why it never worked out: His thoughts are most comfortable when expressed in short outbursts, rather than ongoing narrative. “I don’t have enough to say to fill a book, “ the man thinks.

…I would write about this same man who was told by someone that, in heaven, he would be talking forever because he likes talking so much, this man who does not have enough to say to fill a book.

…I would write about the sister of my friend, a professor of rhetoric, who used to tear out pages of books after reading them. She did this in the front row of her university classes, letting the pages drift down before the professor. I would write that my friend’s sister was a Zen master.

…I would write about enlightenment, without a capital “e," and I would write, “All humanity is waiting for it,” with a capital “A.”

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.
_________________________________________________________________

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.