May 2015 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Lydster, Part 134: Opting out

Neither my wife or I want to have our daughter become a tool to our own sense of activism, ESPECIALLY when it affects her directly.

There has been a great deal of controversy in the state of New York about the school tests tied to something called Common Core. It is more complicated than I wish to get into here, but I wrote about it a bit in my Times Union blog.

There was a statewide movement to get students in grades 3 to 8 to opt-out of the test, which was somewhat successful in many districts, including in my area.

The movement has been around a few years, but I had not paid a great deal of attention. The Daughter took the tests the last couple of years.

This year, however, the framework and the rhetoric changed, with Governor Andrew Cuomo specifically tying education money to teacher performance, based on these tests, and practically ignoring their classroom effectiveness, in the budget passed at the end of March 2015.

Here’s the thing, though: neither my wife or I want to have our daughter become a tool to our own sense of activism, ESPECIALLY when it affects her directly. Moreover, she’s generally a compliant child, eager to please others.

The Sunday before the tests began, on a Tuesday, we FINALLY broached the topic, quite gingerly. I said something like, “You know there are those tests coming up this week. Some people are opting out. Whether you take them or not is entirely up to you.”

She said, rather quickly, “I’m opting out. They’re using the test to grade the teachers, not us.” This is largely correct and astute.

We hadn’t specifically talked about this, certainly not directly to her, although we’ve been watching news reports. Most parents would say they chose their kids to opt-out, but The Daughter made her own decision. I happen to agree with it, but I’m more pleased that she’s become this separate, thinking person.

For the periods of the test, a total of 18 hours over a few weeks (!), she was assigned to help the kindergarten teacher read to the kids, and the like. She liked it.
***
Here are some anecdotes about the English language test. There are many out there.

Memorial Day 2015: war is failure

“It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60.”

There was a time when I thought there were bad guys and good guys, and they were very easily distinguishable.

But now I think war is failure. Even a “just war” may be, at very best, the least bad outcome. And usually, just a bad outcome, with war profiteers (Blackwater, or whatever they’re calling themselves now). Pope Francis got it right this month: “Many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war.”

Any American born since 1984 has spent at least half of his or her life with the country at war. My life percentage is only about 40%.

We go to war in Iraq. Some of us thought it was a mistake at the time. Others discover it later, realizing we were lied to. Now, the calls by some to go war with Iran ring hollow.

Unintended consequences of war: My Lai in Vietnam, Abu Gharib in Iraq, to name just two during my lifetime. I highly recommend Graphic Novels About Consequences and Horrors of War by Meryl Jaffe.

On this Memorial Day, I also suggest Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement; I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past:

Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60. [Compare, for instance, Laos and Iraq.]

But if much in the American way of war remains dismally familiar some five decades later, one thing of major significance has changed, something you can see regularly in I.F. Stone’s Weekly but not in our present world. Thirteen years after our set of disastrous wars started, where is the massive antiwar movement, including an army in near revolt and a Congress with significant critics in significant positions?

If, so many years into the disastrous war on terror, the Afghan War that never ends, and most recently Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0, there is no significant antiwar movement in this country, you can thank the only fit of brilliance the national security state has displayed. It successfully drummed us out of service. The sole task it left to Americans, 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, was the ludicrous one of repeatedly thanking the troops for their service, something that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s or 1960s because you would, in essence, have been thanking yourself.

T is for Twitter and Too fast and Thoughtlessness and Trouble

Will it improve on the silence?

I joined Twitter in July 2007, I’m told. I tried it out for a few weeks but didn’t “get” it and frankly forgot about it for at least a couple of years.

Now I post my various blogs to it automatically through Networked Blogs. I only have about 7,100 tweets. I follow about 1,850 people and am followed by almost 1,300, but I am genuinely unconcerned about the numbers.

Whereas Twitter, for some people, seems to be the lifeblood for their connectedness to the world. Unfortunately, because it’s so easy because the message is necessarily so short – like people’s attention spans – folks have made bad choices on the platform:

In accusing someone of inappropriate financing, a woman shows how she flunked basic arithmetic.
Bloomsburg University’s Joey Casselberry, a junior first baseman, was thrown off the team after making a racist and sexist tweet about 13-year-old Little Leaguer Mo’ne Davis. To her credit, she asked that he be reinstated to his team.
SamuraiFrog pointed to a heartbreaking Canadian PSA “where homeless people read mean tweets about the homeless. Those are some heartless tweets written by people who don’t see other people as human beings.” And how much thought was given in the composition of their venom?
A tweet about AIDS and race gets a woman fired from her job.

In these, and many more examples, the problem is that it was too easy to attempt to be clever and snarky. The key to going viral, I’m told, is to say something everyone is thinking, and say it in a way no one thought of. The above examples were widely seen, but not in the way they would have wished.

The blog post Do We Know We Aren’t Really Thinking? speaks to this:

I am guilty of rushing to form an opinion without thinking through the various sides of the issue, without digging into the details, without remembering that an opinion is just that… This happens both in our personal interactions in our narrow domains as well as in the wider context when we are engaging with larger issues related to… the world.

Perhaps this tendency to form an opinion without thinking is exaggerated today thanks to the 24×7 information-overload we all experience through mass media and social media. But perhaps there is a bigger reason for why we don’t really think properly, why we believe we are thinking when we really are only experiencing thought-sensations.

It seems to me that most of us aren’t even aware that we are not really thinking when we believe we are. It is perhaps because we don’t know how our mind works. We don’t know what it takes to truly think without allowing any interference from other parts of ourselves. For the most part we don’t even know what those other parts are, parts which have a tendency to interfere and influence our thinking process.

There’s a trend in cooking called the slow food movement, designed “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat.” One appreciates the flavors more when one takes time to savor the food. That tomato sauce you put on the stove for hours tastes better than the stuff you heat up on the stove for seven minutes.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for a slow social media writing movement, about actually spending a moment or three assessing the IMPACT of one’s comment before clicking. Actually, there IS such a mechanism; ask yourself, Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

This is not a new notion. It has been attributed to Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader (b.1926): “Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?” In the digital age, digital silence – or at least a respite – is often in order.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Music Throwback Saturday: Strawberry Letter #23

The Brothers Johnson’s rendition of Strawberry Letter #23 hit the Hot 100 and peaked at number five.

For a birthday some years back, I was given this CD of songs by Shuggie Otis, born Johnny Alexander Veliotes, Jr. on November 30, 1953, son of the really cool musician, rhythm and blues pioneer Johnny Otis. The album featured his song Strawberry Letter #23.

From the Wikipedia:

“George Johnson of the Brothers Johnson was dating one of Otis’ cousins when he came across the album Freedom Flight.

“The group recorded ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ for their 1977 album Right on Time, which was produced by Quincy Jones, and the album went platinum. They recorded the song in a funkier, more dance-oriented vein than the original Otis version.

“Their rendition hit the Hot 100 and peaked at number five and reached number one on the Soul Singles chart in 1977.

“Studio guitar player Lee Ritenour recreated Otis’ original guitar solo for the Brothers Johnson cover.”

Here’s the Shuggie Otis original version.

Here’s the Brothers Johnson cover version, which I have on vinyl.

Very trippy lyrics:

Red magic satin playing near
Rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind
Purple shower, bells and tea
Orange birds and river cousins dressed in green
Blue flower echo from a cherry cloud
Feel sunshine sparkle pink and blue

Strawberry Letter #23 by the Brothers Johnson has been sampled several times, including by Beyonce, and covered by Kevin Campbell and others.

Michael Jackson used bassist Louis Johnson on his Off the Wall and Thriller albums.

Before that, The Brothers Johnson sang on this 1976 Lesley Gore number Sometimes, from her Love Me By Name album, produced, like her early hits, and Michael’s albums, by Quincy Jones. (Hat tip to Dustbury.)

Sadly, Louis Johnson passed away at the age of 60 on May 21, 2015.

MOVIE REVIEW: Danny Collins

I’m always happy to see Bobby Cannavale NOT playing a mobster or thug.

I pretty much HAD to see the movie Danny Collins, which is based, sort of, on a message John Lennon sent to a budding musician named Steve Tilston, interviewed in a magazine back in 1971. Lennon saw the piece and sent a letter to the Tilston, care of the magazine, inviting Steve to call John, complete with his phone number. But the young musician never saw the letter until years later.

That actually happened, and it is the jumping-off point of this fictional piece of an aging musician (Al Pacino), who stays on the road, performing the same songs he wrote three decades ago, essentially selling out, and he needs to “self-medicate” to get through it all. His friend/manager Frank (Christopher Plummer) gives him the present of the aforementioned letter, and suddenly his too-young girlfriend, and excesses in his lifestyle, seem lacking.

He essentially moves into a New Jersey hotel room, tries to woo the hotel manager (Annette Bening, who reminded me of an older version of Annie Hall), and fix up a pair of hotel employees (Melissa Benoist, Josh Peck). Mostly, he tries to make things right by Tom (Bobby Cannavale) and his family (Jennifer Garner, young Giselle Eisenberg), though Tom, for good reason, wants nothing to do with Danny.

The Wife and I saw this at the Spectrum Theatre on our anniversary, and we liked it quite a lot. I think nearly ALL the reviews, positive (78%) and negative, are largely true. The cast makes the mushy journey about self-discovery palatable. The narrative isn’t particularly surprising, though it has a few twists, yet the story by writer/director Dan Fogelman was charming, engaging, and probably a bit schmaltzy. The John Lennon songs that made up most of the soundtrack, were overly familiar to me, but might be revelatory for someone not so seeped into his music.

I’m always happy to see Bobby Cannavale NOT playing a mobster or thug, but just a guy trying to get by.

As usual, I must complain about people leaving the moment the credits start, as they miss the REAL guy (Tilston) talking about, belatedly, getting the Lennon letter.

Oh, two last things: apparently, Michael Caine was originally cast as Danny’s manager, before being replaced by Plummer; Caine’s name still shows up in some cast listings. The original name of the film was to be Imagine, based on the Lennon song; I’m glad it was changed.