Mid Year pop music report

In alphabetical order, here are the 11 CDs that seemed to hold my attention the longest since the start of the new year. It's hard to say whether any of these will make my annual end of the year list. I need to listen to all of them more carefully between now and December. It's hard to know now whether they will bear up to repeated playing. And we haven't heard what else the year may bring. But, for what it's worth, these are 10 discs from the first half of 2012 worth seeking out.




Europe by Allo Darlin'. Tuneful ear candy from a young London band lead by songwriter Elizabeth Morris. The four-piece band plays soft, jangly, guitar-oriented indie pop and occasionally extends the music palette to ukelele. Morris's earnest vocals are easy to embrace; her lyrics are amusing and confessional. Highlights include "Capriconia" and "Neil Armstrong," a whimsical tip of the hat to the first man on the moon.

 
Bloom by Beach House. This CD, the fourth from Beach House, may be their most challenging CD yet. Victoria LeGrand and Alex Scally have crafted a record that seems more like a suite of that meshes together in a dream-like sequence than individual songs. "It's not the band's most immediate music, but the album's challenging mix of heartbroken words and aloof sounds rewards patient and repeated listening," trills the All Music Guide.

Locked Down, by Dr. John.   Mac Rebbenack is back with a blistering set of hoodoo voodoo and he still sounds ticked off at the Army Corps of Engineers for what they done to his hometown, N'Awlins.  (They left the city unprotected to the wrath of Hurricane Katrina by allowing the city's levees to remain in a weakened state for decades). Locked Down isn't as swampy as his 1968 record, "Gris-Gris" but it may be his best record since that classic.  Its grooves are  raw and immediate; its lyrics are charged with righteous indignation. It melds primal rock, careening R&B, and electric blues in a downright nasty brew.

Voyageur by Kathleen Edwards. I'm a sucker for Kathleen Edward's alt-country sound and this 2012 release is up to her usual high standards. Her lyrics give listeners personal glimpses into life lived on an emotional roller coaster: the "voyage" at the heart of the record is a misguided love affair. Her lamentable choices, sung with heart-torn regrets and played with ragged glory by her band, go down as easy as Jack Daniels over ice.

Clear Heart Full Eyes by Craig Finn.  Finn's first solo CD feels like a return to form after the relative disappointment of Stay Positive, the Hold Steady's 2008 effort. Finn's songs on Clear Heart are fixated on the American fascination with religious experience, personal pilgrimage and eventual loss of faith. It's a journey worth taking. The band doesn't rock quite as hard as the Hold Steady does, but their performance seems to serve the contemplative nature of the songs.
 





Grifter's Hymnal by Ray Wylie Hubbard. Long associated with the outlaw brand of West Texas country music, Hubbard was introduced to the music world in 1973 when Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his classic, "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother." For years, he's burnished his outlaw reputation with a rawboned version of country music that skews close to the heart of rock 'n roll. Put "Coricidin Bottle" on and hear the sounds of a band coming unhinged from the git-go. Lucas Hubbard, Ray's son, plays lead and makes his Papa proud. Ringo Starr has a vocal cameo on "Coochy Coochy."

 Home Again, Michael Kiwanuka. Rippling with a sweet and soulful vibe, this is the best world music I've heard so far this year. Home Again is getting huge support from Philadelphia's public radio station, WXPN, which has placed the  title track and a lilting blues called "I'm Getting Ready" into heavy rotation. You can hear echoes of Van Morrison and Bill Withers in his plaintive vocals.





Signs & Signifiers by J.D. McPherson. Not sure this one will have the staying power needed to make my end of the year list, but I'm pretty certain "North Side Gal" is gonna be one of my favorite songs of the year. McPherson and his band, wearing hairstyles straight out of "Grease", channel the swagger and swing of Elvis Presley's Sun Studio trio (Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black). If you can resist tapping your foot along to the dozen rockabilly-tinged songs on this record, you better have your pulse checked.

On the Impossible Past by the Menzingers. A short, sweet, burst of power pop/punk from Scranton's favorite sons. Sounds like Green Day ramped up on amphetamines that have been washed down with Red Bull. "The Obituaries" may be the best song you'll never hear on the radio all year, featuring hooks galore and a refrain replete with F'bombs that make it difficult to resist wanting to sing along with your car windows open. Dead solid certain to embarrass your 15-year-old if she's traveling with you. I speak from experience.  


Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen. A return to form for Springsteen, Wrecking Ball contains his best songwriting since Tunnel of Love IMHO. Springsteen's songwriting can be called calculating on this record, if only because he's so obviously penned a soundtrack to the 2012 election season for President Obama and the Democrats. You may not be okay with that, but count me all in. The stakes are high. "Easy Money" doesn't just rail at the fat cats on Wall Street, it's a bald face call to armed insurrection for their theft of the treasury. Woody Guthrie famously painted "this guitar kills fascists" on his instrument. Don't be too surprised if Springsteen  doesn't borrow that line for his summer tour.

The Lost Kerosene Tapes, 1999 by Bob Woodruff. Woodruff is barely  known, even among diehard alt-country fans. What a shame! Dreams & Saturday Nights is a hard to find, out of print classic from 1994. If you like Steve Earle's early CDs, (especially Guitartown and I Feel Alright) you'll probably dig Woodruff. The Lost Kerosene Tapes, 1999 are just that: an incredible collection of incendiary songs songs that were lost in the vaults of time for the last 13 years and recently recovered and released. Not likely to make him a household name but epic none the less. 

Father's Day will never feel the same

Father's Day will never feel the same. Not after last year.


My father was diagnosed with lymphoma one year ago on Father's Day 2011. Three months later the tenacious cancer claimed his life. The picture above appeared on his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sept. 15th of last year.


I have been thinking a lot about my father these past few weeks and a lot about this holiday. I miss my dad, but I have been miffed at him recently. Sometimes the telephone will ring and I half expect it to be him, telling me about a PBS special he thought I should watch or about a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd I need to read. I usually fielded these calls as gracefully as my personality would allow: not very.


I didn't like to be told what to do by him when I was growing up and, after I left home, I didn't like it any better. After bristling for years about being told what I should do with my free time, I wasn't always as patient as I could been. Now, of course, I wish I could take his call and agree with him: "Yes, thanks Dad, I should watch that Pete Seeger documentary. I will as soon as I get off the phone with you." I miss him. I even miss his unsolicited advice.


When my semester ended several weeks ago, I decided to finally begin the task of cleaning out my garage....a space my Dad appropriated soon after I took ownership of my home in Downingtown. In fact, his request to use my garage for storage came on the day of settlement. I received one of his hand-written notes in my mailbox on the afternoon the deed was signed over to me. I was impressed by his thoughtfulness when I tore open the envelope. How good of him, to wish me well in my new digs and to calculate the arrival time of his wishes for the precise day the house became mine. He had sent it three days earlier from Wisconsin, where he was visiting my sister.


Then I read his request and I had to stifle the urge to laugh. Two of my sisters had turned aside his request to use their basement or garage to store his stuff. Now he was making this request of me.  I was an easy mark. Unlike my sisters, I was divorced. I didn't have to answer to a spouse. On top of that, my brother had been helping my dad pay his bills. For years my father had used his homes as an ATM machine, borrowing against the equity to pay his bills. I knew I could save my dad (and the rest of us) nearly $300 a month if we stopped paying monthly rent on a storage unit in  Jenkintown.


I made a deal with my dad. If he would allow me to use half the garage to store my things: golf clubs, my lawn mower, two bikes, some boxes of books, he could use half of my garage space. But he would have to empty the storage unit and get rid of most of the stuff there. Although this pained him, he agreed. The local siblings rented a dumpster, had it delivered to the storage unit, and spent six hours filling it up with the stuff he couldn't squeeze into his allotted space in my garage. 

It was a sad day for my father. My mom, who dealt with my father's hording issues for decades, was happier than I had seen her in years. She couldn't conceal her delight in his misery. She smiled the whole day long.

Six months later, however, my mower and bicycles were stuffed into one corner of my garage. The rest of it was packed with his things. My golf clubs were transported to a basement closet. Boxes and boxes of his things filled the garage. Much of it was fishing and camping equipment; enough to outfit a small sporting goods store. There were tools. A variety of hammers and saws and shovels. And plastic tool boxes (some full, a few half-full, many totally empty). There were boxes of Gerber baby food jars full of screws, nails, bolts and tacks. This was stuff in plain sight. Other things he wisely kept hidden from me.

On the weekend of his funeral service, I invited my brothers, brothers-in-law and nephews to come and claim some of his camping and fishing equipment. Dozens of rods and reels, a gaffer hook, several sets of waders and fishing nets, pup tents and sleeping bags all left the premises. But in the last few weeks I have filled two garbage cans full of junk every time the trash collectors come, slowly emptying my garage of stuff he'd been gathering for years. 

Why he kept the stuff I've tossed out is hard to imagine. A few boxes were full of things that still had use. His clothes and several boxes of books I gave to Goodwill. Four spare wheels/tires I dropped off at Goodyear Tires. The rest of it boggled my mind. Scraps of wood. Dozens and dozens of empty 35 mm film cannisters. A box of half filled cans of paint, decades old and rusted shut. A box of spray paint cans, all empty. A box of old turpentine cans, also empty. A box of empty baby food jars. Several boxes of rags. A box of empty coffee tins. A box of rubber bicycle tire innertubes.Chemicals for his camper commode.

I feel a sense of some relief now that I can see space for my car. But there is a sense of sadness, too. A sense I had been used by my father for all those months, that he had needlessly appropriated garage space for this junk. All I really had done was enabled his hording pathology right to the bitter end. The stuff was so well hidden from view that, it occurred to me, he realized I would have tossed it all out once I discovered the contents of those boxes. 

As I unburden my garage of the flotsam of father's life, there is also the sad realization my father's hording issues have been passed on to me and some of my siblings. My own home is awash with "stuff." Thousands of CDs and records. Hundreds of books. Dozens and dozens of ball caps and sports jerseys. Things I don't really need but can't yet part with. I have a high tolerance for clutter and it bothers me.

Is seems inordinately difficult for me to unburden myself of my junk. I am not my father; I am not that "bad".

Not yet. 

Unfortunately, we can't always throw away the things our parents leave behind. Some of the stuff just sticks to you.

Isabel's speech to the Nick Berg Foundation

My daughter, Isabel Bauerlein, gave this 15-minute speech to the Nick Berg Foundation yesterday at the Days Hotel in West Chester, Pa. She was the initial recipient of the Nick Berg Scholarship when she graduated from Henderson High School in 2006. The award is given annually to students who who show high character and have interest and ability in music and/or science, two academic areas Nick Berg himself excelled at while attending Henderson. 

Emelia Del Grosso, a senior at Henderson who will be attending James Madison University to major in music in Sepetember, received the 2012 Nick Berg Scholarship yesterday at the Nick Berg Memorial Brunch. The text below is Isabel's speech to the Nick Berg Foundation. I hope you find it as inspirational as I did. I am very proud to Isabel's father. Readers who may want to contribute to the award in the future can reach its president, Luke Lorenz, at the Nick Berg Initiative, Inc. 

In Ray Bradbury’s futuristic short story “The Sound of Thunder,” the main character, Eckels, travels back to prehistoric times to hunt. When Eckels come face to face with a dinosaur, he freezes. He freaks. He cannot pull the trigger. He turns off the path and tears through the jungle, diving head first back into the time machine.

When Eckels returns to the present time, he opens the door to a world completely changed. Different language, different buildings, different government. Eckels looks down at his shoes and sees, embedded in the mud, one green and gold and completely dead butterfly. He falls to the floor in crisis, trying to wrap his head  around how the death of one butterfly could change the balance of time, setting off a chain of events like unstoppable dominos.

Small, seemingly insignificant events ripple through time and change the course of our lives. This happens every day. Steve Jobs, in his famous Stanford University commencement speech, talked about how you can only find these inciting events looking back retrospectively on your life. For Jobs, an inconsequential  calligraphy class he audited after dropping out of college, later became the inspiration to
include beautiful and creative fonts on Apple computers. He said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you have to connect them looking back.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous child psychologist, was working in D.C. in the late 1950s. On a rainy evening, he passed two women who were holding signs, protesting the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR. Though unfamiliar with the topic, he was inspired by their dedication, and this brief encounter led him to investigate the issue further. He later became one of the leaders in the nuclear disarmament movement. His involvement gave more legitimacy to the cause and helped bring the the issue to the forefront of the American political consciousness. Now, years later, President Obama has established a treaty to cut back both countries’ nuclear arsenals by one third. You never know what moment will become the spark that ignites a movement.

I got into the teaching profession because I wanted to make a real difference. I wanted to tackle all injustice and inequality and incite real change. I saw how teaching a kid to read could open up infinite doors of possibility in their life. What I didn’t know about teaching, was that you never really get to see your hard work pay off until years later. It was pretty jarring to come to the realization that, right now, I am merely planting seeds. Those seeds will grow in time, but it could take years to see how a connection I made with a student or a lesson that stuck might manifest later. I am overly idealistic, but not a particularly patient person. I want to visibly see them being propelled into success. The most I get is a shrug, an eye roll, a vacant, glassy stare from my students.

I am currently in my first year teaching. I ran into my grad professor after the first few months of starting, and he asked me how my year was going. I described it as “being in the trenches.” I literally feel like I am in the front lines of a battle. Sometimes, I feel like a Roman gladiator, getting ready to face a lion. The days I come out victorious are few and far between. Usually the lion eats me alive.

I teach 7th grade reading and English in a rural middle school outside of Nashville, Tennessee. When I tell people I am a middle school teacher, I get one of three reactions: “oh, bless your heart,” “what were you thinking?!”, or “wow, that’s brave.”  Everyone says the first year is the hardest. Everyone says it gets better. I’ve decided that, statistically speaking, it must get better than this, otherwise there would be no second year teachers and the entire public education system would fall apart. It’s hard to feel like you are making much of an impact at all on hormonal, amped up 12 and 13 year olds. One student could not control his flatulence and showed no embarrassment at letting it rip in the middle of my lessons. Another asked me if I talked so fast because I was a Yankee. Another accidentally kicked another student in the groin. Ooops!?

Hollywood got it totally wrong. I am still waiting for my "Stand and Deliver" moment, and no one has called me “Captain, My Captain” yet. I have to remind myself that some impacts start small and resonate later in bigger ways. I am hoping, with fingers crossed, that some ounce of a love of reading, some droplet of appreciation for writing, some piece of a lesson on treating others with respect, some dash of curiosity will sit with my students and manifest later. I have faith this will happen, because I know that I have been impacted by several teachers in ways that may have seemed small to begin with.

Mrs. Gilland was my third grade teacher. She was a tiny, jolly woman who always wore cotton gloves because she was horribly allergic to chalk, dust, paper, and most airborne things. Before we opened a book, we would gather around her piano and belt out everything from “America the Beautiful” to “Let it Be.” She planted the idea that I was a musician. I loved watching her little gloved fingers work the keys. I could feel the music in my whole body and I was uninhibited when I sang in that class. I went on in 4th
grade to select trumpet as my instrument and band became a central part of my identity.

Later in high school, I went on perform in district and regional band and I marched five seasons with Henderson’s marching band. I followed in my brother’s footsteps and marched four years in the Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps. Mrs. Gilland planted the seed of music. Over the years, it was nourished in such a way that I’ve played French horn in every city I’ve ever moved to as an adult. It is easy, looking back, to connect the dots and see how Mrs. Gilland set me on a life path that would be filled with musical adventures around the world.

Mr.Umile was my AP English teacher. I knew he was going to be different than any other teacher when I first stepped into his class junior year. Mr.Umile was young, he proclaimed he knew Bam Margara from high school, he played bass in a band, and was listed on IMDB as having acted in low budget indi movies. He made being an English nerd look cool. He pulled out a guitar and sang vocabulary to us. We read "Catcher in the Rye" and he lamented, “man, I wish I could go back and read it again at your age. You’ll
never connect to it as much as you will right now.” He valued our insights despite our age, and he talked to us like adults. He infused each lesson with humor and creativity, art and music. One day we would dig into Bob Dylan lyrics and then the next, we would dissect a T.S. Eliot poem. I learned that my voice did matter and that my opinion was important. I went on to study English Education because of that class and now I find myself in front of 135 students acting part thespian, part comedian, part musician, part drill sergeant, part motivational speaker.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and down about this first year teaching. But, when I actually take a deep breath and look around, I am surrounded by inspiring people every single day. I have several great coworkers that are pretty wonderful role models. At Shafter Middle School, I teach with a man named Ryan Williams. He teaches Science and runs the track program. The kids call him simply, “Coach.” He is a master at catching kids who would normally cause problems in the classroom and builds relationships with them instead. If I didn’t know that Ryan was a 7th grade Science teacher, I would have thought for sure that he was a rock star. Kids swarm around him, bask in his presence, try harder, care more, study hard to win his approval and praise. All of his students dress up in formal attire to take his midterm and final exam. These apathetic 7th graders who care more about their hair and their cell phone, actually get excited for science class.

Ryan, an incredibly fit 29 year old, just came down with stage four melanoma thatm metastasized as a tumor in his back. It has been shocking to see what the chemo has done to his body. His commitment and drive and enthusiasm during his treatment melts my first year teaching woes into near insignificance. I have never seen someone work so hard to get back to work. He would come right from chemo treatments to school,
sometimes stealing a quick nap at his desk when the kids went to lunch. His commitment to being a positive force in the kids‘ lives is unwavering. His impact with the kids and his coworkers is monumental, and there is no telling how far and wide his presence will reach.

It’s not just the teachers, but the staff that is pretty great. Our janitors make a mere $7.50 an hour. Many work two jobs. They work harder than anyone else in the school. They show up before the sun rises and stay far past the darkening of the evening sky. They clean up the messes of 12 and 13 year olds without complaint. They polish the floors and empty the trash cans. They take pride in their work. This year, Sumner County was millions of dollars over budget. Of all costs to cut, they proposed to outsource the janitorial positions. I was inspired by the overwhelming outcry of outrage, among students, teachers, and administration. “How can you outsource family?” one teacher wrote. The janitors were left hanging in limbo for months, not knowing if their benefits would be cut, if they would be without jobs after the April 17th ruling. I am incredibly inspired that my coworkers stood up and spoke out on their behalf. The opposition was so loud that Sumner Country decided to find other places to cut costs.

Sometimes in the chaos and shuffle of the day, it is easy to forget that I am teaching children who have tremendous responsibilities outside of this school. 70 percent of my students are on free and reduced lunch. For a lot of students, Shafer gives them the only two meals they will get that day. One student has five siblings. Her mom works the night shift and is asleep when she gets home from school. She rushes home after school to hurry up and get her homework done before her siblings get off the bus. She plays with them and makes them dinner, and waits for her grand mom to come over at 7 p.m. to stay with them through the night. She is a straight A student and she is a vigilant attendant at the after school literature magazine I help run. She is sweet and kind and optimistic about her future. Her drive as a 12 year old takes my breath away.

I feel lucky to have grown up with a mom who instilled a sense of independence and self reliance within myself. When she told me that I could do anything I could putm my mind to, I believed her. I’m not sure if she regrets this, or is proud of this trait, as it has given me the desire and the ability to just pick up and leave the country at random. I went to Australia for a study abroad program and after graduating from college, I spent a year in China. The spicy schiwan noodles, the towering skycrapers in Shanghai, the busy streets, the tiered pagodas. Big things stick out and still do, but the smaller details can only be recalled when I pull out my photo albums. What does stick out in my memory, without any photo album crutch, are the interactions I had with incredible people around the world. People stand out in your mind in ways that architecture or
landscapes can’t.

You don’t need a picture to remember Nick Berg. He is a man whose intelligence and compassion graced the world in resonating ways. After reading all of the anecdotes on the Nickberg website, it is obvious that this man reached out and affected many people. So many people look back on interactions with him and connect the dots to how he changed their life. People like Katie Werner, who knew him as a camp counselor when she attended a short science summer camp as a kid, recalled that his love for science was absolutely contagious. She went on to take Physics in high school because of her introduction to Bergology years prior. Over and over again, friends and acquaintances describe the pleasure of knowing him as, “unforgettable,” “influential,” “life changing.”

People who have crossed paths with Nick mention little events as memorable. It’s the science summer camp, or a drive with a friend from college back home for winter break, or a casual conversation in a dorm room, or a memory from high school marching band that stick out. These moments set our lives in motion in undetectable ways. Much later, we can look back and connect the dots. With a little distance, we can
see just how much of an impact those fleeting moments made. Just like Dr. Spock’s brief encounter with a sidewalk protestor, brief encounters with Nick Berg resounded in large ways for everyone who met him.

I regret that I was never able to meet Nick in person. However, winning this scholarship in 2005 as a high school senior linked me to him forever. It gave me the opportunity to learn about his life, his family, his friends, his vast contributions. I am honored to have my name tied to a guy who was so compassionate and driven and philanthropic. I feel a good sort of pressure to live a life that embodies these traits.

I am honored to be here to help continue the scholarship in Nick’s name. I am so happy to see the love and support in this room and the pledge to continue doing good in his name. Nick’s presence continues to send out positive waves of influence. Carli Shillingford, Nick’s friend from high school may have said it best in her anecdote. She said, “sometimes people come into our life, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same. I can safely say for many of us, that we will never be the same after having the gift of knowing Nick Berg.”

The Internet: Humanity's Friend or Foe?

This term paper was written by one of my WRT220 (Writing About the Apocalypse) students and turned in this week. I thought his message was worth sharing with friends and readers of my blog column. I found this to be an immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking read. As I like to tell my students: the best papers are the ones that teach me something. This one did. Well cone, Jacob Bremmer! I have posted a picture he gave me at the bottom of his paper. Kudos, Jacob!!



The Internet: Humanity’s Friend or Foe?

By Jacob Bremmer

Throughout our history as human beings, we have evolved and developed new ways to communicate. This, above all else, is what has set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We started with grunts and groans, moved up to pictures on cave walls; spoken word came about, and finally, written language. We moved from writing on stationary rocks and brittle clay tablets up to papyrus scrolls and eventually paper. As technological advances increased, information has become more readily available; modern advances such as the telegraph, radio, telephones, televisions, and now, computers have made information more accessible than ever.

Today, anything you want to read about is just a Google away. Despite this ever-growing abundance of available information, it seems to me the amount of general, useful knowledge known by the younger generation is rapidly declining, as well as the amount of face-to-face interaction. The rising use of smart phones, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and even 24 hour news networks have contributed heavily to the incessant increase of mostly irrelevant information and the decline of face-to-face interaction, which is crucial to everyday life. This generation does not know what it is like not to live such constant, and yet veiled, connection to the people and things around them. They do not know how to change the oil or a headlight in the car that they rely on every day (both extremely simple tasks), but they can tell you all about Kim Kardashian's million dollar wedding in 140 characters or less. This overload of irrelevant information has brought us to a very crucial point in human history: will this new Internet generation, raised on quenching the undying thirst for distractions, take advantage of the positive uses of the internet, or fall into social disrepair?

Concern

I am in no way the first one who has been concerned about the dangers of our thirst for more visceral forms of distraction. In fact, this concern has been voiced for almost as long as we have been able to voice it. Plato wrote about man's inability and further, his unwillingness to see the real world some 2300 years ago in Book VII of his Politeia, where he introduces the famous Allegory of the Cave. He surmises that most people see a life as though they were watching the shadows of a puppet show; they cannot see the actual puppets themselves, just the silhouette it casts on the wall. The majority, who had the ability to think and speak but could not grasp the “forms” or ideas of the things they were seeing, would go about their lives thinking that those shadows were things themselves. Today, however, instead of seeing shadows of ideas on the walls of caves, we see them on the walls of our Facebook friends. Only if we turn our heads to view the objects themselves, to grasp the ideas that are represented, will we break our delusion.

Neil Postman wrote in his 1985 book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death of an even earlier, wiser, and more formidable example that stirred his thoughts on the dangers of different forms of media:

I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as so many others have, why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. (Postman)


It seems important to mention that the belief in an abstract being requires the ability to grasp and put faith in abstract concepts. As media has progressed, we have moved from entertainment from the conceptual media requiring us to use our imaginations (such as books) to concrete pictures of things (as seen in the visual representation brought forth by television). This “picture book” society poses an inherent problem for the intellect of humankind by offering distractions from the ideas that are important in maintaining and furthering humanity along the same path. One key example of this is talked about by Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. He mentions the shift in political elections from dealing the ideas of a particular candidate, as was the case before television endowed the masses with the ability to see particular candidates and speeches, to one where visual imagery such as body language and physical appearance is of more importance. Postman, in talking about how William Howard Taft would not be considered as a candidate today, said that “the shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing the public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television.” (Postman, 7)

I am reminded of the lead up to the 2012 primaries where the media heavily criticized the potentiality of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as a GOP candidate because of his physical weight. In this way, we are moving from a society based on words and ideas to one based on images and appearances.

Chris Hedges in his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, makes the case that “the culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth.” (Hedges, 45) He cited a study conducted by The Princeton Review that:

Analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. … In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of an eleventh grader (11.2), and Douglas addressed the crowd using a vocabulary suitable (12.0) for a high-school graduate. In the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the candidates spoke in language accessible to tenth graders. In the 1992 debates, Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did Perot (6.3). During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Gore at a high seventh-grade level (7.6).



This drastic decline in rhetorical significance represents the decline in American's interest in ideas and abstract thoughts. He concludes that we have fundamentally turned away from the ideas that candidates present and focus instead on the power of their narrative, truth notwithstanding. This is why we see so many negative ads during the political season, many of which are simply not true or taken completely out of context; the worst part is that nobody bothers to look into whether or not these accusations are true or not (even though websites like Politico look into the truthfulness of accusations, most do not bother finding out the truth), the majority just nod along and add it to the list of why we are not voting for a particular candidate. We do not vote for someone because we like their ideas, we vote because we like the candidate, rather, we like the story that the candidate presents us. Politics has moved from an important process in exercising our rights for self-determination to become another gear in the entertainment machine, a circus sideshow act like the fire-eater or sword-swallower.



The Instant Gratificulture


Another key shift from in our culture that I would like to address here is the consumerist nature that drives us. We have become a culture of instant gratification and quick fixes. I cancan not even count how many times I have heard people say, “I’ll just buy a new one!” instead of fixing what was broken. This mindset goes hand-in-hand with the drastic decrease in quality goods; instead of spending the money on a quality made item that can be fixed if it should ever break, we are more than happy to buy cheaper, goods of inferior quality multiple times. Oh, and we want it now! Aldous Huxley, who warned us in Brave New World about the dangers of a culture believing that “ending is better than mending,” would be rolling over in his grave at the lack of functional knowledge in today's society. Perhaps I am biased in this respect since I have always had the curiosity to know how the things I use every day work and family members that have taught me things I could not figure out on my own. I draw on no more than my own personal experiences in this matter. For example, the car of a friend broke down on him a few weeks back; the engine would not turn over. He opened the hood and gave it only a cursory glance before calling a tow truck to haul it to the nearest garage. Some $350 later, he had a working car and no desire to learn what was wrong with it or how to fix it if it happened again. Turns out, he had a bad starter motor, something that costs roughly $60 and is relatively easy to change out. To me, paying to have the car towed to a garage and having them perform a simple job like this is a perfect example of how today's society views things.

A major example of a society that still possesses that 'know-how' of generations past is the Amish. This incredible sub-sect of society relies solely on themselves for their livelihood. They till their fields with horse and plow, erect buildings with no more than hammer and nails. They rely on their farm animals to get them into town. They know everything they use inside and out, and can fix something if it breaks. They do not rely on modern conveniences such as electricity to make their lives easier; they are living proof that anything can be accomplished with a little elbow grease and a minute of contemplation. We could learn quite a bit about life from these people if we just slowed down to listen.


Effects of the Internet on Information

The increases that new technologies, such as the Internet, have brought to the abundance and speed of acquiring information are a principal part in the downturn of thought. A half century ago, the general speed and accessibility of information was much lower; we were confined to huge libraries full of books that had to be picked through in order to find something of relevance. Computers have completely automated this process, making it much easier and faster to find pertinent information on a subject. Something as simple as looking up a word in the dictionary takes Google just .35 seconds to perform, with millions of results. This incredible speed and accessibility of information has only served to reinforce the ideas of instant-gratification that society is embracing.

The advent of the internet has brought us to a point of no-looking-back. In his book, Neil Postman has gone through great lengths and many pages to show American's historical obsession with printed material. He points out the huge emphasis on literacy in Colonial times and the strong desire of the people to read. “From 1650 onward, almost all New England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a “reading and writing” school, the large communities being required to maintain a grammar school, as well.” (Postman, 32) With this focus on teaching the skills of reading and writing compounded with the availability of printing presses as early as 1638 and rise of newspapers and attention to books over the subsequent centuries, it is no surprise why Americans have become so fascinated by the Internet. It makes printed word much easier to be found and read at our convenience.

It is clear, then, that the Internet is a great resource for improving our education, but it has been argued that it is no substitute for face-to-face learning in a classroom setting. According to a study published by Jay Liebowitz in Volume 51 Issue 3 of College Teaching, classes were studied that taught exercises related mainly to face-to face skills and, as such, the author was skeptical as to whether such skills (such as dealing with employees who were not performing properly) could be taught in a solely online class. Nevertheless, he found that “online students believed that they achieved the course objectives to, at least, the same extent (98 percent) as the face-to-face students.” It seems obvious the potential of the internet in improving our understanding of the world, but many like me believe that unless we actively seek out useful information, it blends into the distracting din of the entertainment machine.

There are countless websites that simply extend the boundaries of television culture. We can now watch our favorite TV shows on our smartphones or iPads while we ride along in the car or on a train. MySpace and Facebook allow us to keep in contact with friends we have not seen in years because they live across the country, and to keep in even closer contact with friends we see more often. We spend hours a day looking to see what our friends are up to. The internet, which offers such novel ways of spreading ideas between people, has been reduced to a way to share pictures of cats. This is not to say that ideas are not sparked on such online collaboration websites such as Facebook. In fact, we can look to Egypt for a perfect example of how these social networks should be used to spread ideas and inform people in order to facilitate change. They managed to inform and organize enough people through the internet to start a revolution in January 2011 and overthrow an oppressive regime.


Oppressing Ourselves


Unfortunately for us, our oppression is self-inflicted. As Chris Hedges talks about in Empire of Illusion, we readily throw ourselves into the chains of slavery to the entertainment machine, willingly passing by thought about ideas and sitting down to be entertained, shutting our brains off in the process. We have found a way to become active participants in the drama that we are so enthralled by on television through the internet. “Reality” shows, such as The Real World, that put people in constant conflict with one another may have brought this into acceptance in actual life, not so much in person where it could cause trouble for the aggressor, but on the internet under the veil of anonymity and separation. There has been a shift from conflicting ideas as a way to advance those ideas to conflict for the sake of conflict. In fact, according to a study done my Kaveri Subrahmanyan and Patricia Greenfield in Volume 18, Issue 1 of the psychological journal The Future of Children, “teens now conduct a higher proportion of their communication through writing in an electronic medium rather than face-to-face or voice-to-voice—in effect, relatively depersonalizing the process of interpersonal communication.” (Subrahmanyan and Greenfield, 136) This depersonalization of interpersonal communication that is provided by the internet seems to “produce a disinhibiting effect on both sexual and racist behavior,” leading to a drastic increase in cyber-bullying, which could be filling the need our society has gained for conflict.


The Internet, Learning, and Family Relations


The depersonalization could be a good thing, however, if it has anything to do with the findings of Jay Liebowitz in the previously noted study on online learning in college students, stating that he was impressed by the “thorough, insightful, analytical, and well-written paragraphs and pages that the students posted on the bulletin boards.” (Liebowitz, 82) Behind the screen of a computer, the depersonalization of communication between parties allows for ideas to flow freely and time for responses to be revised and thought through.

Depersonalization of those who we talk to on the internet also allow for more self-disclosure than teens would normally feel uncomfortable talking about with those they know. In a study done by Gustavo Mesch in 2006, published by the Journal of Family Communication, it was found that family relations were negatively affected when the internet was used for social communication.

Social scientist Claude S. Fischer argues on the contrary in his book Still Connected, Family and Friends in America since 1970, saying that,” Some of the ways in which Americans engaged with people in their immediate circles changed, but the intimacy and support of close family and friendship ties stayed about the same” from 1970 until now (Fischer, 94).

Richard Fisher even goes so far as to argue that Facebook has done wonders for our social lives, bringing up findings by sociologist Mark Granovetter in 1973 who “showed how the loose acquaintances, or “weak ties”, in our social network punch far above their weight in their influence over our behavior and choices (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, p1360). Granovetter found that a significant percentage of people get their jobs as a result of information provided by a weak tie.” Facebook, by its very nature, increases the amount of “weak ties” we can keep in contact with and, therefore, increases our opportunities to glean relevant information. Fisher goes on to say how “their [Facebook] acquaintances provide them with more trusted and relevant news, information or recommendations.” (Fisher, 2)

These studies have shown generally mixed feelings about the benefits and dangers of using the internet for social matters. Some say that it hasn’t caused a significant change in offline relationships (Fischer), while others (Subrahmanyan and Greenfield) come to the conclusion that teens use of the Internet for social matters did, in fact, take much away from family relationships. Still others (Fisher) praise social networking websites for the all-important “weak ties” that influence our behavior and choices, and Jay Liebowitz had nothing but good things to say about the feasibility of the internet to teach interpersonal skills.

Conclusion

In the end, there is much conflicting evidence on the nature of the Internet as it pertains to social development as well as the ability to facilitate learning, but it is also difficult for researchers to keep up with the blazing speed with which technology advances. As it seems social development can be affected by the role the internet plays in teenagers lives (Subrahmanyan and Greenfield), it is crucial that the educational benefits of the internet must be taken advantage of, especially as children are increasingly spending time indoors rather than out. We must instill the desire to learn in the minds of our future generations if we wish to avoid the prophecy posed by Joshua Meyrowitz in his 1985 book No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior that “the increasingly sophisticated use of interactive computer graphics and the drive toward computers that can understand and use human speech, both suggest that mastery of literacy may soon be as irrelevant to the basic operation of computers and computer controlled machines as it is to the operation of television sets and automobiles.” (Meyrowitz, 328)

Siri, the talking iPhone, brings us one step closer to this fear of Meyrowitz, which is no doubt a shared consensus with Huxley’s Brave New World. “Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. . . that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.” He saw, unlike an oppressive Orwellian dictatorship, that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think.” (Postman, vii) We must make sure that this vision does not come to fruition by educating our young people, teaching them to think of all perspectives on an issue instead of going along with the rest of the sheeple. We must instill the insatiable desire to learn in the coming generations in order to keep this nightmare just that.

Jill McDevitt's Feminique Boutique to celebrate four years in the borough

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIZR7NF3UqA

The Femininque Boutique, West Chester’s controversial (and only!) “sex shop” is celebrating its fourth year anniversary on Saturday, May 5th, with an open house / birthday party. The store’s own, 25-year- old “sexpert” Jill McDevitt, promises the event to will fun and inspirational, right down to the day’s cupcake offerings: cream-filled penises and vulvas.

At 15, most girls are still nervous high-school freshmen, trying out for the cheerleading squad and awkwardly making out with their boyfriends at the Friday night football game. Not McDevitt, With the youthful exuberance of a 15-year-old young woman, she decided that she wanted to be nation’s foremost “sexpert.” While speaking at West Chester University recently, McDevitt pointed to a “how-to” sex column in a back-issue of Cosmopolitan as the source of inspiration for her aspired career. She declared that day, she would have her own sex advice column and she hoped to be the go-to experts that the editors at Condé Nast called for expert testimony whenever they needed a quote from a sexual advice columnist.

It didn’t take long for her goal to be realized. In her freshmen year at East Stroudsburg University, McDevitt was dishing out sex advice to a roomful of xco-eds when the editor of the campus paper walked by and caught drift of her conversation about “the double standards of male and female masturbation.” On the spot, she offered McDevitt a campus sex column in the university newspaper. It soon because the talk of campus – and not everyone was happy to read her open-minded opinions about sex, a theme that would repeat itself constantly over the next six or seven years.

A year later she decided to transfer to the University of Waterloo in Canada, because it was the only school in North America with an accredited B.A. degree program in “Sexuality, Marriage, and Family.” It took her just four years of college to achieve her dream of becoming a “sexpert.” Finding a job in her field, however, proved to be as daunting as finding a red-coated beaver on the hustling street of Montreal. McDevitt found herself in an unwelcoming and unrelenting job environment. With no job offers in hand, she decided to take out ads and pass out flyers marketing “in-home presentations” for bachelorette parties or “girl’s nights”, though McDevitt stressed her ability and willingness to to work with men, too.

No one was rushing to sign up for her lectures or bachelorette parties. She quickly recognized the need to establish a “headquarters”, a place she could sell products and begin to amass regular customers with a recognizable brand name. Just 18 weeks after graduation, at 21-years-old, McDevitt signed the lease on a storefront in downtown West Chester. Unfortunately, in the days that followed, she found herself in the center of a fire storm of controversy. Acquiring a retail permit for Feminique Boutique, as she aptly decided to name her store, was her first hurdle; the borough’s classification of her store as a “sex shop” made it considerably more difficult to ascertain.

After hiring an attorney, who pointed out the borough had no ordinance against a shop that sold sex toys and bedroom lingerie, she was granted a permit, much to collective chagrin of the clergy and parishioners at St. Agnes Roman Catholic church, just three blocks down the street of her shop. In fact, the church has refused to concede the permit issue and more than 100 members of the church crowded council’s chambers to protest the permit. In a letter to the editor at the time, a St. Agnes sister wrote “Jill McDevitt gains a Ph.D. in a field that brings suffering and heartache. The respect and reverence of our body and that of others fulfills God’s promise.”

McDevitt steadfastly maintains on her website that “free expression of one's sexuality is a vital part of being human, women are sexual subjects, not objects, and women have the right to access sexuality education and products in an environment that is sex-positive and female-friendly.” She had created a store that focused on female sexual empowerment, and describes her boutique as “categorically vanilla and PG-13.” Nevertheless, the media firestorm that soon ensued propelled McDevitt into the local, and briefly national, spotlight.

Despite the presence of hundreds of protestors gathered at borough council meetings, “the press was on my side.” When the story broke on the internet, it went viral and she received an outpouring of support from individuals all over the world in the form of blogs, people who signed petitions and donations to her legal fund. According to her own calculations, the air time and column inches she received in the local news gave her an estimated $35,000 worth of free publicity. Even as an inexperienced 21-year-old entrepreneur, McDevitt soon recognized the value of free marketing. She smartly decided to “milk her 15 minutes” for all it was worth. She recently published a book, "Fighting the Crusade Against Sex: Being Sex-Positive in a Sex-Negative World," and has five more in the works.

She writes a sex blog for Chester County’s Daily Local newspaper and has been featured in several Philadelphia weeklies. Most recently, Entertainment Weekly asked for her expert input on the recent success of the erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey and Philadelphia Magazine contacted her and will soon feature her in a personality profile, she said. She is also self-producing a short reality TV series that can be accessed through her website. Her next personal challenge is to teach a sex education workshop in all 50 states and as many international locations as possible.

She alleges that current public school sex education programs are “embarrassingly horrendous.” In fact, McDevitt recently volunteered in the Dominican Republic to teach high-risk children sexual safety and wrote about in an article for the WC Press. On her website, McDevitt describes herself as a sexologist, feminist sex shop owner, sex educator, public speaker, entertainer, blogger, author, and sexual rights advocate. She strives to create a “sex-positive” environment at the Feminique Boutique, where men and women do not feel ashamed to ask questions, and can explore their sexuality in a safe and comfortable setting.

To date, McDevitt has educated over 3,000 women and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Human Sexuality; upon completion she claims that she will be the only person in the world with all three of their degrees in “sex.” Feminique Boutique is located at 104 N. Church Street in West Chester, Pa. The store is open 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Monday through Saturday. McDevitt is available for sex education workshops, parties and in-home demonstrations. The 4th anniversary party of the opening of the shop is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 5th. Mike Driscoll, a student in my Public Affairs Reporting class, contribued to this story.

Disarming Armageddon: Why Students Need to learn the linguistic and moral complexities of the Book of Revelation

Organized religion, in particular fundamentalist Christianity, has greatly impacted facets of American life in the last 30 years, from politics to civil rights to popular culture. We are in the midst of a raging firestorm, a culture war that threatens the very fabric of the nation. Yet, the genesis of our culture war, especially the most dubious questions of faith that it instigates, is rarely discussed in the American academy, except in institutions of higher learning that proudly bear a religious affiliation and that expect their students to shun attempts to discuss their religious views with people who disagree with them.

We have reached a point in the nation’s history when professors in higher education can no longer afford to pretend that religion is a purely personal, subjective belief. If universities are meant to prepare students to fully participate in society, then students need to be taught how to question and investigate everything, including their most personal religious beliefs, not just traditional academic subjects. American politics and religion are so interwoven these days, often in divisive ways, that one really cannot be studied without some consideration of the other. This is particularly important for students of history, political science, cultural studies and journalism.

Many people are afraid of talking about religion because it's such an emotional, subjective topic. And college professors (as well as high school teachers) are afraid of talking about religion in their classes because they fear students' parents will contact them, accusing them of trying to "indoctrinate" their children. In American society today, religion is where sex education was 30-40 years ago. Teen pregnancies, AIDS and STDs made sex education in schools a necessity. And now Koran-burning, the racial profiling of immigrants, and jihads against America have shown the need for universities to help students learn how to objectively examine the pros and cons of the impact of religion on society.

One boundary that needs to be overcome in college classrooms is the irrational fear of discussing matters of faith with college students. Too many college professors believe the separation of church and state extends into the classroom or that religious beliefs are too personal to discuss with students. They assume that matters of faith should be left to churches, because faith is based on matters that cannot be proven or subject to scientific inquiry. Why bother?

The very nature of academe – especially its recent embrace of tolerance for other cultures, creeds and customs -- does not provide an obvious rhetorical platform or institutional support for the questioning of religious ideology. Professors at public institutions seem to feel that study or discussion of religious ideology is not “academic” and should be the purview of religious schools or theological seminaries. This leaves a vast majority of students who attend public institutions unaware of and unprepared to understand one of the most onerous, and potentially dangerous, political movements of our time – the increasingly polarizing pull of Christian fundamentalists on American politics.

Ironically, as the fervent belief of fundamentalist Christian Americans grows that the return of Jesus Christ is immanent (and that America has a vital role to play in End Times eschatology), the nation is becoming torn asunder with a form of intolerance that universities claim to disown. For the past 18 years, I have been teaching a course at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania called “Literature of the Apocalypse.” Six or seven years ago, the composition faculty at West Chester asked me to teach the same material in a research-based writing class called “Writing About the Apocalypse.” The class has become a popular fixture among underclassmen at the university. I teach two sections of the class every year and they quickly reach the maximum enrollment of 25 students. (At least one of my students from West Chester is here today, at this lecture.) People in general find the Book of Revelation fascinating to discuss. But college students have more at stake in the end of the world than do professors. They have most of their lives yet to live. We don’t. They seek reassurance about their future. They wish to be reassured that the world they inhabit will not soon end. Taking just one (admittedly controversial) book of the Bible and examining its historical contexts, its influence on American politics and American culture and the hold it continues to possess on our collective imaginations, allows me to introduce a variety of interdisciplinary subjects that are frequently considered taboo in the classroom. It makes for a thought-provoking class, one that most students fully want to engage in.

Obviously, the world is an increasingly dangerous place in which to live. Nuclear armaments still threaten us with extinction; AIDS has not been cured and has ravaged Africa; the degradation of the planet continues at an unabated and frightening pace, despite scientific evidence that suggests we ought to be better stewards of the planet; starvation and over-population become ever more endemic with every passing month; hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes become increasingly devastating and deadly. In short, it is troublesome to try to debunk St. John’s Revelation at a time when so many of its predictions become increasingly plausible. Therein lies the fascinating pull of the subject matter and the relevance of the course for college students. By a happy circumstance, Revelation is designed to make students think about the implications of the end of the world and their own mortality, even as it tries to persuade them that the world’s end will transpire according to a biblical blueprint that grips the imagination of evangelical Christians. My two classes, which utilize Revelation as a starting point to discuss the nation’s culture war and then to introduce students to the issues mentioned above, try to place the Book of Revelation in its historical context and foster a hope that humankind has a responsibility to search for ways to keep the end from happening. “Debunking the Apocalypse” might be a better phrase to describe the arc of the two courses.

My discussion today will focus on the roots of the class, how the Book of Revelation can be discussed in a historical context that makes it less threatening to modern-day students, and the political and social impact that American religious fundamentalists have on American political and cultural life.

Because belief in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation among fundamentalist Christians has become a driving force in American culture and a crucial component of the culture wars, it is my position that public institutions of higher learning have a responsibility to help student-citizens understand the underlying dangers of a literal interpretation of a biblical End Times. Professors of rhetoric and literature at such institutions could be helping students think about solutions for preserving the planet, instead of ceding a calamitous ending to religious fundamentalist believers. Chris Hedges, one of the nation’s preeminent chroniclers about the nexus of religion and politics in America, mentions the prominence of Revelation in his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America:

The Book of Revelation, a crucial text for the radical Christian Right, appears to show Christ returning to earth at the head of an avenging army. It is one of the few places in the Bible where Christ is associated with violence. This bizarre book, omitted from some of the early canons and relegated to the back of the Bible by Martin Luther, may have been a way, as scholars contend, for early Christians to cope with Roman persecution and their dreams of final triumph and glory. The book, however, paints a picture of a bloody battle between the forces of good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist, God and Satan, and the torment and utter destruction of all who do not follow the faith. In this vision, only the faithful will be allowed to enter the gates of the New Jerusalem. All others will disappear, cast into the lake of fire. The Warrior’s defeat of the armies of the nations, a vast apocalyptic vision of war… It is a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on non-believers. (Hedges, pgs. 4-5)

It is important for students to understand why Revelation was meant to give first century Christians hope. Scholars believe Revelation was written around 90 A.D., some sixty years after the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. His earliest disciples were told, and believed, Christ would return within their lifetimes. When St. John’s Revelation was handed to them, it was meant to help them cope with the persecution of their own lives; they were being crucified and fed to lions in the Roman Coliseum around this time. The Jerusalem Bible explains,

It must be understood first and foremost as a tract for the times, written to increase hope and determination of the church on earth in a period of disturbance and bitter persecution, and prophesying the certain downfall and destruction of the Roman imperial power. The imagery, largely drawn from the Old Testament, especially Daniel, allows the author to allude to the enemy, Rome, under the guise of an old enemy, Babylon; and to present the happenings of his own day, seen by their reflections in the heavens, as recapitulations or fulfillments of the great events of Israel’s past. (Jerusalem Bible, p. 320)

John wrote Revelation as an open letter of revolt and sedition. It was designed to give hope to people in crisis. But he couched his call for political insurrection in mysterious and symbolic terms to protect those who carried it. To bear such a letter on your person, calling for the overthrow of a sitting government, was a certain death sentence if it was discovered by one of the emperor’s centurions. John’s inner circle knew that “Babylon” was coded language for Rome. Hiding the true meaning of the letter was essential to the safe passage of those who possessed it. All of Revelation is rife with such purposefully opaque meanings, meant to be understood only by the community of believers. The Greek word for Revelation (apocalypse), means “lifting of the veil.”

The hidden meaning of Revelation, its reliance on violence and symbolism to imbue its meaning, is inherently problematic for Christian believers who are told all their lives of the infallibility of the Bible. Because it is God’s word, and must be believed without question, it is “logical” for fundamentalist believers to “know” John’s template for the second coming is bound to happen, just as it is described in the pages of Revelation. To try to suggest that Revelation was not meant to be taken literally, or to try to place it into its natural historical context, calls the Bible’s infallibility into question. Naturally, this would seem not only offensive but heretical to many fundamentalist Christians.

The tension between rational thinking, scientific thought and reasoning, the weighing of evidence in argument to produce consensus, is understandably but irrevocably at odds with the way religious fundamentalists approach their core beliefs. Academics frequently wrestle with the foundations of this intellectual dichotomy. At least I do. I want to believe in God and an afterlife, but I want my belief in a higher power to be based on credible evidence. Most of the evidence of the existence of God and the Resurrection and Second Coming of the Savior from my childhood as an altar boy in the Roman Catholic church fell far short of the intellectual rigors of science that explained the existence of things I could not see but trusted were there, oxygen for instance. I was told to believe without questioning the essential core truths of my faith. Yet I was trained in college as a student of journalism to question everything, especially the things that could not be proven by scientific methodology or persuasive rhetorical argument. Many professors manage to hold onto a strong religious faith despite the very obvious paradoxes that orthodox belief brings with it. But few of them find time to discuss these essential questions of their own lives with their students. They may fear the judgment of their peers for expressing a faith; they may fear there is no room in the curriculum to discuss religious questions in pedagogically narrow classes that focus on biology or economics or mathematics. They may fear that expressing religious belief will alienate some students. Or, conversely, they may fear the judgment of fundamentalist students if they question the rationality of religious belief. Despite all of these fears, it has been my experience that college-level students yearn to discuss questions about religious faith; that discussions about the development of a person’s moral core are an essential part of the educational process; and that college is the perfect time for discussion about such personal issues to take place.

In the past 10 years or so, the nexus between religion and politics has been a fertile field for writers and scholars who have warned of the rising political power of the Christian right and of the right’s thirst to hold onto the reins of power and its attempt to impose what it purports to be “Christian values” on the rest of America. It should come as no big surprise that a strong national defense (justified, in part, by the political right’s assertion of the infallibility of the Bible and Revelation’s portrayal of Jesus as an avenging warrior king) is part of their political agenda. They seek to prepare America not just for the return of the savior but to play a pivotal role in the last world war, known as “Armageddon” in the Bible, the last battle between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan. To a great extent, the core religious belief among American fundamentalists that the nation of Israel is the pre-determined place where Jesus will reveal his return to earth is largely responsible for America’s financial support of Israel. The formation of the nation of Israel was regarded among fundamentalists as one of the essential Biblical “signs” that the return of the Savior was imminent. Chris Hedges, Christopher Hitchens, Kevin Phillips, Michelle Goldberg and Barbara Rossing are among the few writers who have published important books warning of the increasing influence of a strident brand of Christianity and the overt connection between this strident brand of religion and the Republican party. Phillips notes that:

Between 1960 and 2000, the membership of the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention jumped from 10 million to 17 million, while the Pentecostal churches soared from under 2 million to almost 12 million. Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists likewise gained. On the more sedate side of the ledger, the mainstream Episcopalians dropped from 3.5 million to 2 million and the United Methodists slumped from 10 million to under 8 million. The meaning of these changes deepened when one compared the religious intensity, ideology and party preference of the different clergies. Strict fundamentalist-type churches gained; doctrinally loose mainline churches…shrank. The allegro movement of this realignment was swelling in the mid- to late 1980s, precisely when a born-again George W. Bush walked onto the national political stage. Liberal religion was being routed. Surveys taken for the 1988 election captured the extraordinary theological and public policy divisions between the clergy of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptists and the mainline (then still unmerged) Presbyterians. Political party preference mirrored the ideological chasm. On the theological right, 97 percent of the Assemblies of God clergy and 88 percent of the Southern Baptist Convention preachers agreed that Jesus was the only way to salvation; 95 percent of the AOB and 79 percent of the SBC clergy insisted the devil actually existed; 83 percent of the AOG and 54 percent of the SBC shepherds expressed belief in the church’s “rapture.” Conversely, among the Presbyterian clergy – mainline Episcopalians and Congregationalists would not have been too different – only 30 percent identified Jesus as the only way to salvation, just 18 percent believed in the devil and a tiny 5 percent expected the rapture. Abortion, pornography and gay rights topped the concerns of the Pentecostal clergy. Presbyterian ministers, by contrast, prioritized hunger and poverty, civil rights and the environment. (Phillips, p. 216-217)

One of the core beliefs of fundamentalist Christians is that public education is too secular, and that since the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools, public education has fallen into the hands of secular humanists. According to an article in USA Today, (“Home Schooling Grows,” Janice Lloyd, Jan. 5, 2007), the home school movement has climbed steadily over the last 10 years. “The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74 percent from when the Department of National Center for Educational Statistics started keeping track in 1999 and up 36 percent since 2003…. 'There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going,’ says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center. Traditionally the biggest motivations for parents to teach their children at home have been moral or religious reasons and that remains the top pick when parents are asked toexplain their choice.”

In Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg notes that the influence of home schooled children is already having an effect in political offices in the nation’s capital. “The influence of these kids, trained from infancy to be Christian culture warriors, is already making itself felt. Patrick Henry College, located in rural Virginia, caters specifically to homeschooled evangelical students. It has existed since 2000 and accepts fewer than one hundred students a year, yet in 2004’s spring semester it provided 7 percent of the White House’s interns. Twenty-two conservative congressmen have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns” (Goldberg, pgs. 2-3). Michael P. Farris, notes Goldberg, refers to these (home schooling) parents as the Moses generation, because they have successfully led their children out of the bondage of godless public schools. But permanent exile from the American mainstream was never their principle goal. As Farris wrote in his book Generation Joshua, the home-schooling movement “will succeed when our children, the Joshua Generation, engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take the land.” Goldberg explains,

Like America’s past Great Awakenings, the Christian nationalist movement claims that the Bible is absolutely and literally true. But it goes much further, extrapolating a total political program from that truth, and yoking that program to a political party. It is a conflation of scripture and politics that sees America’s triumphs as confirmation of the truth of the Christian religion, and America’s struggles as part of a cosmic contest between God and the devil. It claims supernatural sanction for its campaign of national renewal and speaks rapturously about vanquishing the millions of Americans who would stand in its way. The motivating dream of the movement is the restoration of an imagined Christian nation. With a revisionist history that claims the founders never intended to create a secular country and that separation of church and state is a lie fostered by conniving leftists, Christian nationalism rejects the idea of government neutrality. The movement argues that the absence of religion in public is itself a religion – the malign faith of secular humanism – that must, in the interest of fairness, be balanced with equal deference to the Bible. (Goldberg pgs. 6-7)

At the risk of alienating conservative parents, American schools (especially institutions of higher learning) need to begin to educate American students about the rise of this dangerous threat to the traditional values of the nation: the long-held beliefs of the founders that church and state should be separate; that freedom of worship is one of the most revered rights of the people; and that no brand of religion should enjoy favor over another.

The most dangerously radical idea of all is that the inherently pacifist philosophy of Jesus Christ, as he espoused in the Sermon on the Mount, can somehow be negated and turned inside out by the Warrior Christ as presented in St. John’s fever dream in the Book of Revelation. The Warrior Jesus gives religious fundamentalists a way out of the hard work of peace; it justifies warfare and it establishes the idea that Jesus himself would engage in bloodshed of massive proportions for the sake of vanquishing “enemies” who disagree with him. The paradigm shift that the Book of Revelation represents is so far removed from the life and sayings of Jesus during his time on Earth that its removal from the Bible has long been debated at the highest levels of the church.

Perhaps no modern writer has defined the potential politically propagandistic dangers of Revelation and its powers of persuasion more acutely than Chris Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister (and a former New York Times reporter) who attended the Harvard Divinity School himself with the intention of becoming a preacher. In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Hedges notes that Revelation, “a crucial text for the radical Christian right,” shows Christ’s return to earth at the head of an avenging army and notes this is one of the few places in the Bible where Christ is associated with violence. Says Hedges,


There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence….and the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands – such as antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery – not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith. …Christians often fail to acknowledge that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the Christian Right. Church leaders must denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds. They must do so in the light of other biblical passages that teach a compassion and tolerance, often exemplified by the life of Christ, which stands opposed to bigotry and violence. Until this happens, until the Christian churches wade into the debate, these biblical passages will be used by bigots and despots to give sacred authority to their calls to subjugate or eradicate the enemies of God. This literature in the biblical canon keeps alive the virus of hatred, whether dormant or active, and the possibility of apocalyptic terror in the name of God. (Hedges, p. 6)

There has been no on-going debate about the latent violence in the Book of Revelation in American churches. Attendance is booming in Pentecostal, evangelical and fundamentalist churches that preach a literal interpretation of Revelation. Attendance is declining in moderate American churches that ignore the violent trappings of Revelation or downplay its usefulness as a map for the End Times. Pastors at such churches may fear that de-emphasizing this dangerous last book of the Bible will only further alienate believers.

Now seems like an appropriate time for America’s institutions of higher learning to take up the issue. The connections between the nation’s religious beliefs and its developing culture have never been more important, or more ominous, than they now are. To avoid discussing these important political and cultural issues with students who are curious and concerned about the nation’s future is not only short-sighted but threatens the health and welfare of all inhabitants of our planet. I can think of almost nothing in the Western canon as important to professors of literature, religious and cultural studies, history, political science, composition and rhetoric as the potential extinction of mankind that a religious World War III would most certainly bring to fruition.

If academics don’t soon learn to disarm Armageddon in the classroom, and tear up the template for the End Times that is the Book of Revelation, we risk losing everything in life we hold dear, for human extinction is a form of eternity too. Despite what passionate believers tell us, rational people must always believe it is too big a risk to expect Jesus to rescue us from our own foolishness.


Works Cited

Farris, Michael. Generation Joshua: Restoring the Heritage of Christian Leadership. Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2005.

Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. New York: The Free Press, 2006.

Lloyd, Janice. “Home School Grows.” USA Today, January 5, 2007.

Phillips, Kevin. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Viking Publishers, 2004.

The Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1966.

APSCUF responds to Gov. Corbett's proposed cuts to higher education

A crowd of protestors conveyed their disapproval to Gov. Corbett's proposed budget cuts to the state system of higher education in Harrisburg.


In his 2012-13 budget address today, Gov. Tom Corbett announced his plan to slash funding yet again for Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities, with cuts totaling another $82.5 million for the next academic year. This comes on the heels of the current year’s cuts and budget freeze adding up to more than $112 million in lost state funding for 2011-12. All told, the governor’s proposed budget would mean a total loss of nearly $175 million in state funding since he came into office.

These cuts would set back the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education to funding levels not seen since 1989-90. That’s right — Corbett is trying to send our universities back to the 1980s. Just for fun, try to remember where you were in 1989… For reference’s sake, it was the year of the Tiananmen Square uprising and the Berlin Wall coming down. The Billboard Hot 100 Song of the Year was “Look Away” by Chicago. “Saved by the Bell” was in its first season.

Here is APSCUF’s official statement:

GOVERNOR CORBETT’S BUDGET CUTS TO PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION JEOPARDIZE PENNSYLVANIA’S FUTURE
Funding for state-owned universities is necessary to ensure that Pennsylvania students have the opportunity to go to college.

HARRISBURG – Today Governor Tom Corbett revealed his FY 2012-13 state budget proposal, which cuts funding for Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities by 20 percent, or $82.5 million. The president of the association representing 6,000 faculty members and coaches at the State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) institutions expressed dismay that the governor has once again attempted to balance the budget on the backs of students and their working families.

The governor’s proposed budget allocates $330 million to PASSHE, a loss of almost $175 million since Corbett took office. His budget proposal comes just one month after he requested that the State System freeze five percent of last year’s appropriation.

“Since taking office, Governor Corbett has taken every opportunity to decrease funding for our universities,” said Dr. Steve Hicks, president of APSCUF. “We understand that these are challenging economic times, but our students and their families are already struggling to make ends meet. Additional budget cuts are going to put the college dream out of reach for many Pennsylvanians.”

In June, Governor Corbett signed a budget that reduced funding for PASSHE by 18 percent.

As a result, PASSHE was forced to raise tuition 7.5 percent.

“PASSHE has a state-mandated mission to provide accessible, affordable, ‘high quality education at the lowest possible cost to students.’ Our universities cannot continue to meet these goals without critical state support,” Dr. Hicks stated. “The governor’s proposal puts current funding for the State System below 1989-90 levels. This short-sighted budget fix will have a lasting impact on the future of the Commonwealth.”

“Our campus communities must stand together for quality education,” Hicks said. “I urge the legislature to reaffirm the promise of affordable higher education for the working families of Pennsylvania.”

The governor’s budget proposal includes cuts to higher education totaling $265.4 million. In addition to the State System reduction, three of the four state-related universities will see cuts totaling $146.9 million, community colleges, $8.8 million, and the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, $27.2 million.
So it looks like its déjà vu all over again. We intend to fight these proposed cuts, just as we did last year, but we once again need your help. Here’s what you can do:



1. Share this post with your friends and colleagues, either by forwarding via email or sharing on social media (you can use the buttons at the bottom of this post). We need to get the word out as quickly as possible to as many members, students and alumni as possible.

2. Encourage your students to get involved in the following ways:

Liking the PA Students Voice Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pastudentsvoice, or
Following the PA Students Voice Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/pastudentsvoice.
3. Register for our budget mobilization webinar, which will be held next Wednesday at 2 p.m. The APSCUF government relations team will be sharing our strategy to combat the governor’s plan and talking about best practices in reaching out to legislators. It’s limited to the first 100 registrants, so hurry and sign up today!

4. Sign up to participate in the APSCUF Lobby Day events on March 26 and 27. On Monday evening, we will have a reception in Harrisburg at Ceoltas Irish Pub from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. On Tuesday, we will be meeting with elected officials at the state Capitol. Please fill out the following form by March 9 if you plan to attend APSCUF Lobby Day in Harrisburg.