The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Copeland:

This obscuring of our dead and wounded is typical of the Bush Gang. I recently wrote in my weblog that,"This war will test our capacity to ignore the dead."

Almost every day we lose people in Iraq. And the fate of our wounded has been under-reported. They are almost invisible.

The implication of that 1888 Committee Report is that education had to be restructured in a way that would make the laboring classes socially compliant. The manufacturing sector, for which this system was fashioned, has shown a steady decline over the last 30 years or so. I wonder what social model will be considered when social engineers and educators come around to re-designing the system.

We clearly cannot do without an emphasis on the sciences. But there is also a need to commit sufficient resources to liberal arts education. The danger is that the teaching of history, for instance, will become more politically sanitized and superficial than it already is. Accountability and civic responsibilty depend on critcal thinking skills. The role that our country assumes in the future rests on this society's knowledge of the outside world. The American Dream, I like to think, is about more than material acquisition; it is about meaningful work. What kind of society trains its children for mean and meaningless work?

I've worked as a substitute teacher for 7 years and it's discouraging to see the ill effects of a system built to serve an assembly line. Some changes in teaching social skills have improved the rowdy atmosphere in schools. But I agree that structure and curricula need an overhaul.

When I began my student teaching I was shocked to find so many 9th graders who could not put together a coherent paragraph. Focus on reading and writing skills is needed for comprehension in all subjects.

The traditional American curriculum included a study of the Classics. There should be a greater awareness of the Greek and Latin materials in translation, electives in those source languages, and a much greater offering of modern languages in public school.

I'm glad everyone made it home safe and sound. When I saw the video on the news of people abandoning their cars on the freeway, it was like a shot from some End-Of-The-World flic.

There are plenty of sharp Americans across the country, who can recognize "textbook fascism" when they see it. The kind of moral courage shown by Alan, the police chief, and town officials is something worthy of praise.

I visited Whiskey Bar today, where Billmon has a biting commentary about General Ashcroft's upcoming national tour to promote what is called The Victory Act (God help us). As Billmon indicates, it's pretty doggone Orwellian.

Mary Kay: I suppose we must agree to disagree. But unless I misunderstand the intent of the hate-crimes law, I don't see it as an infringement of free speech. If a person shouts "fire" (as a prank) in a crowded theatre, and people are hurt, there is a question of accountability. The Supreme Court has made a ruling about sticking a burning-cross in someone's front yard; to the effect that it is not a "statement", but a very personal and palpable threat and a threat against life.

And I don't agree that "murder is murder". The crime of killing is decidedly aggravated by certain factors. There is the unwitting crime of manslaughter. Crimes of passion involving killing are more serious, but sometimes admit mitigation. The most heinous crime of killing is acknowledged to be with premeditation. Hate-crime murder must suggest a kind of irrational premeditation, as in the case of the James Byrd killing.

I don't see how such law will impact speech. The law does quite a lot I think, to show that society is willing to show resolve that some historically vulnerable people receive sympathy and a full measure of protection.

I live in Texas and I grew up here. There are times when the death-penalty-loving, knuckle-headed conservatism of the place simply drives me mad. But there is another Texas. It's hard to believe that liberal Democrats once had some clout here. (that was ages ago)

But the liberals and progressives I know in my neck of the woods, I consider to be brave and wonderful souls. There is mind-numbing complacency and traditionalism here in Texas, I grant you. But there have been a few moments when consciousness has been raised in the last few years.

Over the obstructionism of George W. Bush, the State did finally pass a hate-crimes bill in the aftermath of the brutal, racially motivated murder of James Byrd, in Jasper. Byrd's own family let it be known that they didn't want any law that didn't also include protection for gays. The compassion of Byrd's people had a lot to do with the passing of that legislation. The Tulia case got some significant news coverage in Texas. Every once in while you see the local reporters doing really serious work.

There are tantalizing moments when I think that activists might actually wake this place up.

What we have in George W. Bush is a case of arrested adolescence. "Bring 'em on", indeed.

I recently heard someone quote Vladimir Nabokov, who said, "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

But in terms of weapons of mass destruction and the scandal of misinformation, Lewis H. Lapham says in the June 2003 Harper's Magazine "The absence of objection on the part of the American people and the American news media suggested that the truth did not matter, that motive was irrelevant, that the Bush Administration was free to do as it pleased".

This Administration says we are liberators not occupiers, it says you are with us or you are against us, that privacy is respectable but total information awareness is in your interest. Never mind that we built Saddam; the important thing is that we took him down.

Principled people, whether liberal or conservative, must realize that these "writers" of public policy in the White House have no respect for their readers, or for the curiosity that makes civic responsibility possible.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Chris Hedges' new book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning". Hedges was a War correspondent for many years, and presently writes for the New York Times.

"I have watched fighters in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Sudan, the Punjab, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo enter villages tense, exhausted, weary of ambushes, with the fear and tension that comes from combat, and begin to shoot at random. Flames soon lick up from the houses. Discipline, if there was any, disintegrates. Items are looted, civilians are battered with rifle butts, units fall apart, and the violence directed toward unarmed men, women, and children grows as it feeds on itself. The eyes of the soldiers who carry this orgy of death are crazed. They speak only in gutteral shouts. They are high on the power to take lives or spare them, the divine power to destroy. And they are indeed, for a moment, gods swatting down powerless human beings like flies. The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even human lives, is seductive. And the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin. In wartime it often seems to matter little where one came from or how well-schooled or moral one was before the war. The frenzy of the crowd is overpowering". (Hedges, pp 171-2)

"There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war. Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble. The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those who know it to be a lie feed into the dislocation and malaise after war. In the end, neither side can speak to the other. The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence. It seems better to forget"(Hedges, p 176)

a correction to my submission: there was an unintended meaning in use of the word apposite, in the adjectival form, the meaning shifts to signify
"apt" or "fitting", which is surely what I did NOT mean to say. It was an oversight. What I intended to say was "...placing the flag on an equivalent footing with the Divine is one of the tenets of fascism."

I can only commend this excellent commentary; it's one of the best I've seen on this weblog. Setting the State above God; indeed, placing the the flag in an apposite relationship with the Divine, is one of the tenets of fascism.

James Macdonald is minimalizing the horrors that took place in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America. Bodies were regularly dumped in ravines and left in San Salvador as calling cards. The Death Squads regularly pulled workers of buses, and disappeared them. Villages were razed. And DEAR GOD!, that comment about the U.S. government doing its best to stop it. The military and para-military were schooled in the USA.

Mark Shields is the real deal as far a liberal commentary is concerned; and he stands out all the more in comparison to the increasingly tepid News Hour.

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