July 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from Gyden Blog written in the month of July 2008.
Britney Spears finally caught a break. In what had been a very bad period in her life–she lost custody rights to her children and has been admitted this year for psychiatric evaluation–she finally caught some good news. In what may go down as one of the most ridiculous commercials of campaign 2008, the John McCain campaign featured Britney and Paris Hilton in its latest attack against Barack Obama, comparing Obama’s celebrity to that of Paris and Britney. The ad, featured prominently on John McCain’s Web site (complete with a screenshot of Paris), shows pictures of Obama’s recent speech in Berlin, where he played to a crowd of 200,000 +. Apparently, a politician being able to fill stadiums compares unfavorably to playing the cheese aisle at a local grocery store. (I wonder if Nelson Mandela is just a celebrity, since his birthday party attracted tens of thousands of people last month?)
There are so many things that are just downright bizarre about this latest attack, but this nugget is perhaps the one that shows how out of touch John McCain’s advisers may actually be. Explaining the ad, McCain adviser Rick Davis has said:
“What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world. And I would say from our estimations, Britney and Paris came in second and third.”
Britney second and Paris third? Of all the celebrities…IN THE WORLD?
Where’s Oprah? How about David Beckham? Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie? According to Forbes, which recently published a list of Top 100 celebrities, neither Paris nor Britney are in the top 100. (Britney is probably very relieved that Forbes’s methodology must have been off and that she is indeed still one of the top celebs in the world.)
In the ad, it was obvious that the McCain campaign was not really trying to compare Obama to a celebrity (or else, the GOP would have to explain away why Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan were acceptable celebrity politicians); rather, they were trying to compare Obama to celebrities who have been held up for scorn, trying to attach their Scarlet letter to Obama. But, in trying to be cute and funny and at the same time make a serious political point, the campaign unveiled its own cultural illiteracy.
A clumsy ad, executed clumsily. But, at least it’s probably only a one-day story. Onto the Veepstakes! (Hopefully.)
Written by Michael Levy on July 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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My new book White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement places conservatism within the big picture of modern American history. The book traces the origins of modern conservatism to the 1920s. It explains why conservativism triumphed in the late 20th century and why it is has fallen into disarray under the leadership of President George W. Bush.
The review of my book in the New York Times by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum shows that at least some diehard defenders of the Bush administration do not wish to enter into in a serious conversation about America’s conservative political tradition, but rather are engaged in sweeping self-denial at the expense of fairness, accuracy, and historical understanding. In Frum’s view only patriotic anti-communist and the pristine free-market theories of University of Chicago economists should be included in the conservative pantheon. Certainly nothing belongs that even hints of a less than respectable and inclusive approach to sensitive issues such as race, gender, religion, or business-self interest.
This response to Frum’s partisan-driven review is aimed at opening up a discussion about the rise (and likely fall) of conservativism based on the actual historical record.
My book shows that the modern right arose in the 1920s “out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity.” The “vanguards” of American conservatives in this era “were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.” Support for private enterprise completed this social conservatism to forge a consensus in the 1920s centered on conserving “white Protestant values and private enterprise.” Most of the subsequent history of conservatism revolved around the reinforcing and contradictory features of these core values.
Frum begins his review not by responding to what is in the book, but by critiquing its alleged neglect of contributions to conservatism by Catholics as illustrated by a list of 10 familiar Catholic conservatives. Yet each of these figures rose to prominence in the 1940s or later (most of them much later), which validates my point that a movement launched primarily by white Protestants after World War I later reached “a partial and uneasy rapprochement with Catholics.” This rapprochement “reflected a crucial double-shift in American history: the decline of anti-Catholicism among white Protestants and the rise of a politically and theologically conservative Catholicism that put sexual morality, traditional gender roles, biblical truth, and the protection of Christianity above Church teachings on labor, the death penalty, and social welfare.” (p. 4) Thus, rather than changing the conservative consensus, conservative Catholics largely accommodated themselves to an ongoing tradition.
Rather than neglecting Catholic conservatives I devote a section of the book to the rise of conservative Catholicism at mid-century and extensively probe the contributions of individual Catholics. For example, the book includes 19 pages of references on Senator Joseph McCarthy, 33 pages on William F Buckley, Jr., and 14 pages on Phyllis Schlafly.
Frum claims that I trace the origins of the modern American right to the Ku Klux Klan and to “fascist groupings that troubled the peace of American society in the aftermath of World War I.” Yet historians know that significant fascist groups arose in America only after the advent of the Great Depression. And rather than tracing conservative origins to such groups I conclude that “They gained headlines and worried legislators and prosecutors but ultimately signified little within the larger conservative movement.” (p. 76)
The importance of the Klan of the 1920s, however, should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the now voluminous new Klan literature. This work demonstrates the political importance of the 1920s Klan and its broad appeal to white Protestants that extended far beyond crude racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism.
Frum also ignores the many other crucial influences that I specify as responsible for the “birth of the modern right,” including post World War I anti-communism, business conservativism, evangelical Protestantism, and conservative activism among women. Frum claims that the book “hails women’s suffrage as progressive” and Prohibition and other conservative initiatives as reactionary. Yet the book avoids any attempt to label conservatism as reactionary and argues instead that “American conservative is a powerful and forward-looking as liberalism, although for conservatives the driving forces of American history are Christianity and private enterprise, not secular reasoning and social engineering.” Indeed, by tracing the origins of conservativism to the 1920s the book shows that the movement represented far more than a response to the rise of the modern liberal state in the 1930s. And rather than drawing a supposed progressive-reactionary dichotomy between suffrage and Prohibition as Frum asserts, the book argues instead that “the campaign for suffrage drew its vitality from the same ethnic, racial, and religious forces that backed Prohibition.” (p. 22)
Contrary to Frum’s unsupported claim, the book does not claim that all aspects of conservative philosophy and policy neatly mesh together. Rather, as with every movement, much of the history of conservatism revolves around challenges posed by contradictions from within. It is perfectly plausible for business men like the Du Pont brothers who founded the landmark Liberty League of the 1930s to also have opposed Prohibition, which “exposed the tension between moral reformers and a business community opposed to government control of industry.” That is why, the “dynastic Du Pont family … took the leader in organizing the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.” (p. 14) But for Frum to say the “Liberty League was basically the old Association Against the Prohibition Amendment under a different name,” is a gross distortion of history. Unlike the Prohibition Association, the Liberty League “launched a broad crusade for conservative ideals that advanced the maturation of an interest-group politics not tied to a particular issue or constituency.” (p. 61)
Likewise, individual leaders like Democratic Governor Walter Pierce of Oregon (cited by Frum) struggled with similar contradictions, while others evolved in their thinking over time. For example, Illinois Congressman Samuel Pettingill and General Robert Wood, the Chair of Sears, Roebuck turned from backers of FDR’s New Deal to major conservative leaders. Many of the most prominent neo-conservatives began their political lives as dedicated Marxists.
Although Frum suggests that the book ignores the forward positions on race sometimes taken by Republicans in the early 20th century, the work devotes considerable attention to the racism endemic within the Democratic Party of the era. It notes that until the 1940s, Republicans were much more likely to support civil rights measures than Democrats.
Despite the fact that about half of White Protestant Nation is devoted to business conservatives and their relationship to social conservatives, Frum’s review includes only two brief lines on business conservativism. He says that the book offers “scant reason” for its claim that conservatives have backed private enterprise, but not necessarily free enterprise. In fact, the book includes thousands of words explaining the numerous departures by business conservatives from free market principles. These include backing for protective tariffs; loans, subsidies, and special tax breaks for business, export guarantees, below market access to grazing and drilling on public lands, and special protective legislation. As the Executive Director of the staunchly conservative National Association of Manufacturers said in the 1940s, “businessmen, faced with the hard, cold facts of their immediate self-interest, will endorse ‘exceptions’ to any commonly-accepted definition of the function of competition.” (p. 137)
Frum also charges that the book neglects “change over time.” He fails to understand, however, that the history of political movements combines both stability and change over time. Without common features a movement would be incoherent historically; without change it would stagnate and die. Beyond explaining continuities from the 1920s to the present, the book analyzes major historical transformations within conservativism as well. Examples include the partial rapprochement with Catholics, the advent of neo-conservatives, and the split with libertarians. The book analyzes the shift from conservative support for balanced budgets to supply-side economics, from protectionism to free trade, from isolationism to aggressive interventionism abroad, from support for public education to the backing of private-school vouchers, etc.
Frum additionally suggests that the book needlessly dredges up irrelevant conservative figures and groups such as Elizabeth Dilling, the Liberty Lobby, and the Pioneer Fund. Yet Dilling was a pioneering woman anti-communist whose charges of communist influence within the Roosevelt administration (although tinged with an anti-Semitism that was hardly unusual at the time) had wide resonance on the right in the 1930s and for decades to come. She was a key leader of the enormous mothers’ movement against America’s involvement in World War II. The Liberty Lobby was the first important conservative group to set up shop on Capitol Hill. In the 1960s, its pamphlets on Lyndon Johnson’s unsavory past and the capitulation to the left by Republicans in Congress circulated in the many millions. The Lobby’s Liberty Letter surpassed all other political publications in circulation and its lurid conspiracy theories were echoed by many conservatives including Phyllis Schalfly in her historic work on Barry Goldwater, A Choice Not an Echo, which like Dillings’ books was self-published. The founder of the Pioneer Fund, Wickliffe Preston Draper, was the single largest financial contributor to the massive resistance movement that delayed school integration and other civil rights initiatives for a decade in the 1950s and early ‘60s. His Fund poured many millions of dollars into research that kept alive assertions of black inferiority in intelligence and ability. Some of this work also found its way into the blockbuster book, The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray.
Frum further claims that White Protestant Nation fails to consider the broader political context for the triumph of conservatism in the late 20th century, notably the failures of the Democrats. Yet the book analyzes in great detail the failures of Democratic liberals in the 1970s to respond to economic troubles and challenges abroad. It concludes that Democratic President Jimmy Carter “could not overcome the failings of his first term.” (p. 351) The book also devotes scores of pages to the development of new conservative infrastructure and political appeals in the 1970s. It studies the formation of organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Caucus, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and the Moral Majority. It explores the revival of political activity among conservative business groups including new groups as the Business Roundtable. It explains how conservatives reformulated their social ideology in terms of “pro-family” policies and how they responded to new issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights.
Ironically, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter fails to address the epilogue of White Protestant Nation which explains how conservatism has fallen victim to internal contradictions during the Bush years. (pp. 436-456) The analysis shows that today’s conservatives cannot reconcile their historic opposition to social engineering with their backing for one of the most expensive and ambitious social engineering ventures in US history: the reconstruction of Iraq. They cannot square their backing for states’ rights with their support for constitutional amendments on abortion and gay marriage and their opposition to vehicle emission standards set by California and other states. They cannot reconcile their advocacy of individual freedom with their support for warrantless wiretapping of U. S. citizens, stringent versions of the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. They cannot reconcile their support for limited government, fiscal responsibility, and balanced budget with a president who has built the biggest, most expensive, and most intrusive government in U.S. history.
Perhaps if conservativism were in better shape today, David Frum would feel less compelled to force its history into an ill-fitting partisan box.
Written by Allan J. Lichtman on July 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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Herbert Kalmus had hoped to be a concert pianist, a career choice cut short by a sports injury; he had to settle for an ordinary high-school education, cut short at the age of 16 when, cast out by his stepmother’s family, he went to work as a carpet salesman and bookkeeper. Yet, in the Horatio Alger mold, adversity only made him more determined. He scrimped until he had enough to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned physics and chemistry and set out on a promising academic career.
Fortunately for the filmgoing world, Kalmus had side interests. He liked to tinker, he liked to hang out with inventors and experimenters, and he liked to make money. Well trained in the sciences and something of a venture capitalist before there was a word for such a creature, he was ideally placed to take the call when, along about 1915, an investor showed him the rudiments of a mechanism for taking the flicker out of the flicks, the still-new motion pictures.
Just then Kalmus was experimenting with a new kind of camera. Since the investor had a large sum of money, Kalmus reasoned, why not go one better and, he said, “use it to finance his firm in the development of color moving pictures?”
The investor agreed, and the flicks flickered on. And though it took a long while to recoup the money, the result was a set of technologies called Technicolor, a name containing homage to Kalmus’s alma mater and to the Greek word techne, meaning “art.” All through 1916 and 1917 Kalmus and his partners struggled to overcome a battery of technical problems: how to superimpose multiple negatives and project through multiple apertures, how to wrestle what the human eye sees onto film.
In doing so, they set off a technological revolution. Soon actors and studios, initially skeptical, rushed to attach themselves to the new process. As movie historian Fred Basten writes in Glorious Technicolor, by 1930, the year the Technicolor film King of Jazz won the Academy Award for art direction, Kalmus and company had contracts for 36 features—even though Kalmus really wanted to produce edifying shorts and documentaries rather than what a partner called “two-reel comedies of very ordinary type so far as action goes, but Ziegfieldized to the absolute limit that the censorship will stand.”
The partner won that argument, though inking a deal with Walt Disney kept things clean. The rest is history: Technicolor, which improved on nature just as it revealed it, would soon yield epochal films such as Becky Sharp, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind and help make stars of the likes of Maureen O’Hara, Lucille Ball, Carmen Miranda—and, of course, Lassie.
The times have changed, but Technicolor endures, now providing digital dailies and figuring in videogames and big-budget features such as The Aviator, Syriana, and Kung-Fu Panda. Look for the logo next time you see a film, and the chances are good that you’ll find it somewhere in the credits, nine decades on.
* * *
Here’s a video tribute to Technicolor:
Written by Gregory McNamee on July 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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The part of the Your Brain Online debate that I am interested in is this question: Does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that?
Let’s get clear on what the problem here is. The problem is not that most people are in danger of becoming “uncultured”; there never was a time or a place in which most people were particularly cultured. The problem—if we can believe what some Web 2.0 revolutionaries say—is that those who are cultured are doomed to become uncultured, by the inevitable influence of the Internet on our minds, at least by the standards of liberal education. And our children will never be cultured again, not by the standards of liberal education. Rather, they will be acculturated by the Internet.
It seems that Clay Shirky, just for example, believes that the only thing of cultural importance in the future will take place in “the crowd” online, a “group mind” or a “collective intelligence”—even if the crowd looks in the future a lot different from how it looks in 2008. Of course, I could be misunderstanding Clay, and so I want to make this point very generally, and not as an attack on Clay.
My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. Yet they plainly do have considerable value, on virtually any educated person’s view now. If we did not think so, we would not buy the books of the people who have posted on this forum, for instance: no individual mind would be worth spending so much time studying.
If you are not convinced by the example of Tolstoy, think of various dense, system-building philosophers. If anyone were to say—and I dare not accuse anyone of actually saying this, as that truly would be damning—that such thinkers are no longer relevant, because they weren’t part of anything like a Blogosphere, that would be to declare your own personal intellectual bankruptcy, your utter failure to benefit from a liberal education.
Let’s be serious, here. If you actually think the Internet’s “group mind” somehow renders passé all the difficult, great books, which shaped our civilizations—if that is what you really want to do—then you certainly are not, not in any way, “on the cutting edge.” I don’t concede that one inch. If you say such a thing, then it seems to me you have merely given us embarrassing evidence that you not really fit to be reasoned with.
But I very much doubt that such philistinism—and that might be too good a word for it, because what it is, is just crude, unserious, uneducated, or silly nonsense—is actually the direction we are travelling in. There are far too many people who still actually appreciate all those old books, and the value of the liberal education that only they can impart. Moreover, if we are traveling toward such widespread philistinism, I have not seen the case made convincingly that we are. Merely to point to the power of the Wikipedia model, or the sheer amount of information in the Blogosphere and all the rest of the Internet, does not even come close to making the case. Pointing out that some of us as it were compulsively check e-mail and other short Internet communications, and have little time or concentration for long reading, also does not prove that we are, all of us, doomed to become philistines.
Do I really need to point out to this audience the virtues of liberal education and how they apply in the present case? Sadly, perhaps I do.
“How soon we forget.” Liberal education is so called because it liberates the mind from a million prejudices, replacing them with knowledge of history, science, and culture, and above all making it possible to think through new problems. (For those who are not familiar with the phrase, “liberal education” refers to “the liberal arts,” not to a position on the political spectrum.) So far from being irrelevant, nothing could be more useful in the proper evaluation and appreciation of newfangled stuff like Web 2.0 than a liberal education. Is it any wonder that the principals in the debate are all, quite obviously, possessed of a liberal education and so familiar with great artists and thinkers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Proust?
My concern is not “nostalgic,” of course—why would it be? To say so assumes, first of all, that the Great Books (not just Tolstoy of course) are in fact passé, that we have somehow “moved on” from them. But nobody has established that, not in the slightest way. More importantly, nobody has here clarified in what sense the Internet poses any sort of threat to how we value the Great Books—other than that we might have to rouse ourselves a little if we want to read them. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia or with silly romanticization of a novel-gobbling past. It has to do with a proper valuation of human minds and of what they have produced, both individually and in the aggregate, from around the world and from the dawn of recorded history until the present. If someone really did want to dismiss the power and interest of individual human minds and what they are capable of producing as somehow passé, he would thereby do away with all those great books, and the strange, ever-conflicted, varied culture that resulted from them, and I suppose replace them with the Borg. You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. Right? It’s techno-socially determined. You can’t do anything about it.
Does anybody in this debate really believe that Web 2.0 spells the end of the Great Books and of liberal education, and its entire replacement by the productions of undifferentiated “crowds”?
Surely nobody really believes that, or even anything like it. I do wonder, of course, what the perceived merits of the Great Books and liberal education will be, once we have gone through the massive societal transformation that, I fully agree, the Internet is bringing us. I would like to point out that if we do give up the foundations of Western civilization, indeed the written records of all civilizations, and if we give up even any pretension to having become acquainted with those records, we give up a very great deal.
The prospect is nothing short of horrifying. It would be quite literally the death of civilization as we have known it. That means all the good parts as well as the bad. It essentially would herald not a bright new world, cleaned of bad old influences, but very probably a new dark age. After all, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
As an aside, I should also state (apparently, it’s necessary) that I am not opposed to Web 2.0. If you know me, you’ll realize this is just silly. I just have a different idea about what direction we should take, that’s all. (For some clues, see 1, 2, 3, and <a
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4.) I am much more optimistic about the prospects of the Internet and what it means for human civilization. I think it will enhance liberal education as never before, and more likely to usher in a new enlightenment than to cause the death of civilization.
Written by Larry Sanger on July 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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In an essay published elsewhere I muse on anonymity on the Internet. In traditional public media – newspapers, magazines, radio, television – it is not merely a customary but a nearly universally followed practice for authors and commenters to identify themselves and thus publicly take responsibility for what they write or say. On the Internet it is otherwise, as a glance at the comments on almost any blog will show.
I have no theory to account for this fact. It is easy to imagine why someone posting scurrilous, libelous, or profane comments would wish to hide behind a screen name, but why would someone with nothing to be ashamed of do so? Commenters – anonymous or otherwise – are invited to opine.
It is interesting to place this phenomenon alongside another that seems increasingly common: An obscure person commits some public outrage, often involving multiple murders, and then either commits suicide before being apprehended or acts in such a way as to invite being killed by police. A recent instance, in which the perpetrator succeeded in the first half of the scheme but failed to die, occurred in a church in Tennessee.
I take it I am not alone in being baffled by such behavior. There are many reasons to wish to die, some of them at least arguable, such as debilitating disease or untreatable pain. There are also quiet ways to do so and organizations that will help (no links from me, though). From this fact I infer that these blatantly public suicides flow from something more than just the wish to be free of life and its burdens. This “something more” might well be a wish finally to escape, for just a moment, from obscurity.
Teenagers not uncommonly think about suicide, not as a serious possibility but as a theatrical gesture: “I’ll show them! They’ll be sorry when I’m gone.” Implicit in this mood is the belief that “I” will survive in some manner and will be able to witness and relish the distress left behind. Add to that familiar aspect of adolescence the further damage that alcohol and other drugs may inflict, and perhaps years more of frustrating experience, and you may well have a candidate for the evening news.
There is no question that these episodes attract heavy and often heavy-breathing media coverage. There is no question that would-be public suicides notice this. Beyond that there is little but questions. Is publicity really a motive? Does the publicity given one incident increase the likelihood of others? And my main question today: Would a widely publicized agreement among media outlets not to identify the perpetrators of public murder/suicides have a damping effect on these incidents?
Written by Robert McHenry on July 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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Watch water cut steel.
Written by Tasha Moideen on July 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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The Morph Concept by Nokia shows what role nanotechnology can play in facilitating the use of communication devices in everyday life. These gadgets are flexible, they can discern harmful substances in the environment, and they can even be worn as fashion accessories, as this video makes plain.
Written by Tasha Moideen on July 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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The FDA has announced that it’s safe for us to eat tomatoes again. After all, tomatoes aren’t really out to harm us. These humble salad workhorses parted ways with their ill-willed cousin—nightshade—long ago; they carved out their own, lycopene-fulfilled lives, worked hard to find a niche among the taste buds of humans. It’s a constant uphill battle, though, always being associated with boring foods like lettuce and competing against “unnatural” fruits like grapes from the uppity Vitis clan. At least tomatoes’ heirloom kin are helping boost their popularity.
Of course, every now and then a rotten tomato pops up. But so do shriveled grapes and bruised apples. All are recognizably rotten; us humans just toss them out and move on. But bad tomatoes, now they are bad, far more menacing than their rotten counterparts. Bad tomatoes are all about image. They look just as squeaky clean as their innocent siblings surrounding them in the produce aisle.
The FDA is onto bad tomatoes; these tomatoes are, after all, the whole reason for the existence of the FDA’s Tomato Safety Initiative. Bad tomatoes have committed themselves to lives of crime, and their favorite partner, responsible for causing the most mischief, is Salmonella. These bacteria are conniving. They make bad tomatoes look like amateur criminals. In fact, bad tomatoes wouldn’t even be bad if it weren’t for Salmonella.
However, tomatoes aren’t the only produce prey of Salmonella. Also caught under the harsh lights of produce scrutiny are peppers and cilantro. Just like tomatoes, these foods have been seduced into letting the bacteria crawl under their skins and have unwittingly become the prime suspects in what has been described as the largest outbreak of foodborne illness in U.S. history. Nearly 500 cases of salmonellosis—infection with Salmonella—have occurred in Texas, more than 100 each in Illinois and New Mexico, and at least one in all but four of the remaining continental states. In total, about 1,300 people have been affected (see here for the latest update). Many people never go to a doctor for salmonellosis, though, leading some experts to estimate that thousands more cases may have already occurred.
Although no cause or even hypothetical cause has been presented by the Centers for Disease Control, it seems likely that these bacteria-infected foods were, at some point, exposed to contaminated fertilizer (i.e., Salmonella-laden manure) or contaminated water (e.g., runoff from a nearby pasture). Unfortunately, we may never know where the affected foods that have given rise to the current outbreak originated. There are simply too many variables. Cases have occurred all over the U.S., and people haven’t been able to recall what foods they ate prior to becoming sick. These factors make tracing the trail of sellers, processors, and growers difficult, if not impossible.
Salmonella lives in the intestines of animals, including chickens and pigs, which are far more tolerant to the bacteria’s presence than are human intestines. The bacteria most often make their way into our intestinal tracts via contaminated foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and poorly handled poultry products. Despite efforts of growers and consumers to wash their produce, washing is futile against Salmonella. And although the bacteria can’t reproduce when exposed to cool temperatures, they can survive in refrigerated foods. The only way to kill them is with heat.
The irresistible temptation to eat raw tomatoes and raw peppers is key to this outbreak. We consume them raw and in combination with the other suspect in pico de gallo and similar fresh tortilla chip-dipping fare. Eating contaminated foods delivers Salmonella straight to their habitat of preference, and once inside our cells they switch our immune systems into action, causing the cells of our intestinal tracts to begin a mass exodus.
Salmonella has more than 2,500 different serovars, which basically are subspecies that differ from one another in the immune response-triggering substances present on their cell surfaces. Only a few of Salmonella’s serovars cause 85 percent of salmonellosis cases. At the center of this summer’s massive outbreak is a little-known, quite rare serovar called SaintPaul, derived from the species Salmonella enterica. The underlying reason for SaintPaul’s sudden emergence is a mystery.
This summer Salmonella has its wicked flagella pretty well hooked into tomatoes and pico de gallo company; new cases of salmonellosis are reported every day. Tomatoes have been deemed safe, but really how effective is the Tomato Safety Initiative? Are tomatoes safe now simply because people have stopped eating them this summer, leaving peppers and cilantro in the lurch? Maybe we should try a Salmonella Safety Initiative. Or would that just guarantee the safety of Salmonella?
Written by Kara Rogers on July 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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While the highest performing students in the county are making steady gains, the lowest performing students are improving even faster in math and early reading. This, even though most teachers say that the amount of attention that high-performing students receive in school has stayed the same or increased.
Those are the findings of a new analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution and an accompanying survey of teachers that were issued by the Fordham Institute as part of a series of reports on “High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB.”
The rest of the report (introduction and teacher survey), but Loveless’s analysis indicates that we may have finally figured out some things about how to ensure that students who struggle master the basics of reading and math while pushing up the performance of those who easily master the basics. He provides some deeply disturbing findings about eighth-grade reading, which I’ll get to in a minute, but fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading show gains at both the top and bottom of the achievement scale, with the bottom showing the most gains.
You would think these findings would be cause for major celebration and some well-deserved thanks to elementary school teachers and middle school math teachers who have stepped up to the plate and delivered some solid results—results that we as a nation demanded.
But, perhaps because Loveless’s sober analysis of test score data was accompanied by a rather silly, pity-the-poor-little gifted-children introduction by Chester A. Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, some press accounts said the report showed a “Robin Hood effect.” This, even though Loveless explicitly rejected that idea, saying, “The concern about a Robin Hood effect, in which students at the bottom of the achievement distribution make gains at the expense of high achievers, is not substantiated by NAEP data.”
What the Study Actually Says
Loveless looked at two groups of students—those at the top decile of performance and those at the bottom decile of performance in reading and math at both fourth and eighth grades.
What he found was that in the 1990s, the top and bottom performers improved about equally in fourth-grade math but the top performers improved at a faster rate than the bottom performers in eighth-grade math. Eighth-grade reading was flat for top performers in the 1990s while the low performers improved a little bit.
But the real tragedy of the 1990s was that while fourth-grade reading stayed flat for the top performers, the bottom performers practically fell off the map, dropping about 11 scale score points, which Loveless counts as roughly a grade level. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the NAEP, hates it when people equate scale points on the NAEP to grade levels, but Loveless is a smart guy and I’m willing to admit it for conversational purposes. What he illustrates is that those low-performers, who began the decade horribly, were dealt a terrible blow in the 1990s.
It was that frightening drop-off of performance among our lowest performing students, who are disproportionately students of color and students of poverty, that was part of the impetus for No Child Left Behind—Congress said that it could not in good conscience continue to pour money into high-poverty schools without making sure that poor children and children of color learned to read.
Enter what Loveless calls the “NCLB era,” which he states began with the administration of the 2000 NAEP. That seems a bit premature, since NCLB wasn’t passed until 2001 and didn’t go into effect until 2002. The reason this is important is because there were substantial gains from 2000 to 2002, and lumping them into the post-NCLB slow-and-steady-progress is politically freighted. But, again, Loveless is a smart guy, and he provides some interesting rationale for the 2000 cutoff, so I’m willing to admit this, too, for conversational purposes. Besides, it allows a comparison between the 2000s and the 1990s.
Here’s where there is some really good news.
In 2007, the top performers scored 10 points higher in fourth-grade math over the top performers in 2000, which Loveless says is almost one grade level, and five points in eighth-grade math, which is roughly half a grade level. Not too shabby.
At the same time, the lowest performers in fourth grade gained 18 points and in eighth grade gained 13 points. Hit the hosannas. The gaps are still enormous (top performers at fourth grade are a full 73 points ahead of the bottom performers—the equivalent of more than six years’ difference by Loveless’s estimate—but they are narrowing a bit. And, frankly, American education has been down so long, this looks like up to me.
Good news also in fourth-grade reading: the top performers gained 3 points this decade and the bottom performers gained 16, which means they are now a bit higher than where they stood at the beginning of the 1990s. We seem to finally have figured out something about teaching struggling readers how to read.
The really bad news is in eighth-grade reading, where the top performers stayed absolutely steady and the bottom performers dropped a net of three points.
This is where we need to be sounding the alarm, because this is further evidence that we really haven’t figured out:
1) middle school
2) how to help those kids who have mastered the mechanics of reading to understand material that is more sophisticated than the relatively simple fourth-grade reading selections. If there is an argument that schools don’t have a broad enough or rich enough curriculum, the evidence lies in the eighth-grade reading results. Once basic decoding skills are mastered, reading comprehension is heavily dependent on vocabulary and background knowledge, which are taught in science, social studies, and the arts. It is a longstanding problem that too many middle schools don’t bother teaching much of any of those subjects, and one that we as a nation need to tackle.
In any case, anyone interested in these kinds of questions should read Loveless’s analysis—it is clear and a real contribution to the national conversation on education. You can skip the introduction.
* * *
Karin Chenowith is the author of “It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools
Written by Karin Chenoweth on July 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Who’s the greatest one-hit wonder of all time? According to VH1 it’s Los Del Rio and the Macarena–and who can forget even Madeleine Albright getting jiggy with it at the UN. (As a digression, speaking of getting jiggy with it and my total embarrassment that I used that phrase, Will Smith, the creator of the term, will be turning 40 later this year, and it was just released that the Hancock star was Hollywood’s best-paid actor last year.) But, I say it’s Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights; though it was her only novel, it’s one of the classics of English literature, and this week at Britannica.com’s homepage we remember her on July 30, the 190th anniversary of her birth. (I know Britannica’s literature editors will rightly shoot me dirty looks for the Brontë-Los Del Rio comparison, but I’ll risk the incoming.)
Other highlights of what’s on Britannica.com’s homepage this week:
- What two things do Brian Greene (host of PBS’s The Elegant Universe), Sister Wendy Beckett (the “art nun”), Stephen Venables (the first climber to reach the summit of Everest’s left side of its East Face without Sherpa sypport or supplemental oxygen), and Jimmy Carter (former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) have in common? They’re all Britannica contributors, and they’re all featured this week at Britannica’s homepage. All week long we’ll be highlighting their articles: string theory (Greene), “The Art of Looking at Art” (Beckett), Mount Everest (Venables), and the Camp David Accords (Carter).
- July 28: Last week Britannica featured the 215th anniversary of the birth of Simón Bolívar, and this week Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who considers himself perhaps the spiritual and ideological heir to Bolívar, turns 54. Also on Monday, the famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava turns 57. Among his upcoming projects is Chicago’s Spire, which is slated to become the world’s tallest residential building. And, this featured quote on Britannica’s homepage from Will Rogers, who had a knack for capturing the national mood on politics–both then and now: ”I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
- July 29: On Tuesday, NASA turns 50. The American space agency has landed on the Moon, launched probes and satellites, and developed the first reusable space vehicle. And, Spidey turns 52–no, not the comic book character but England’s Viv Anderson (nicknamed the Spider), who became in 1978 the first player of African descent to play for England’s national team. Also featured on Tuesday is this provocative quote from Albert Einstein: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
- July 30: The Governator (aka Arnold Schwarzenegger), looking like beefcake in the photograph from Conan on Britannica’s homepage, turns 61 on Wednesday and apparently couldn’t get out of his day job as governor of California to star in the upcoming new generation of Terminator films, depriving us of some new catchphrase, such as “I’ll be back.” It’s also the 78th anniversary of Uruguay’s defeat of Argentina in football’s first World Cup and the 43rd anniversary of LBJ’s signing of the landmark bill that created the Medicare and Medicaid programs in the United States.
- July 31: Unlike the evil Voldemort, her name may be spoken. British author J.K. Rowling turns 43 on Thursday, having last year completed the seventh and final book (or not) in the Harry Potter series. Moving from the realm of fantasy to tragedy, Thursday also marks the one-year anniversary of the UN’s authorization of a joint peacekeeping mission in Darfur; the fighting there has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of possibly two million more. Earlier this month, an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor sought a warrant for the arrest of Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir.
- August 1: If Video Killed the Radio Star, it’s MTV’s fault (the song was the first video to appear on the network). MTV–sometimes now derided as “Minus the Videos” because of its move toward greater reality-based programming rather than music videos (but, really, who can live without their fix of the Real World or Road Rules?)–turns 27 on Friday.
- August 2: As the Iraq War continues in its 5th year, Britannica takes a look back at the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), which began 18 years ago Saturday when Saddam Hussein ordered Iraqi forces to invade Kuwait. From one dictator who was hanged to the niece of a president who was overthrown and assassinated in a coup that led to the creation of another dictatorship (can you follow all that?). The niece: Isabel Allende, the famed Chilean author of magic realist tradition, turns 66. The uncle: Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist president of Chile, who was assassinated in 1973. The dictator: Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s military government until 1990 and was, after leaving office, charged with human rights abuses.
- August 3: With all the tumult that has erupted since Brett Favre unannounced his retirement, it’s about time another NFL quarterback takes center stage. New England Patriots QB Tom Brady, winner of three Super Bowls and MVP of two of them, turns 31 on Sunday. Perhaps he’s best known, though, for leading the Pats to a loss in Super Bowl XLII to my Giants (or maybe it’s just us Giants fans who think he’s best known for that?). Sunday also marks the 416th anniversary of Christopher Columbus setting sail for the New World.
This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. I’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.
Written by Michael Levy on July 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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