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Catching a bit of National Public Radio the other day, I chanced to hear a rather blissed-out woman introduce a song she was about to sing as a homage to her teacher, her guru, her lama, her whatever. Of course, I’m well aware that this ritual thanking of the teacher for blessing one’s lowly, ignorant self with infinite wisdom and patience is typical of a great many religious and secular traditions, not just those of the East. But my immediate, gut reaction is one of intense irritation. My modern, Western, Americanized ears scream "fool," "fraud," "charlatan," "cult," "slave," before I have the slightest chance to think about it.

We proud individualists are just not raised to feel that way about those who instruct us, including even or perhaps especially our own parents. Instead we tend to honor as our best teachers, from Socrates on, those who teach exactly the reverse: "Question all authority, including my own." Our fundamental understanding is that knowledge flows from ever-inquiring doubt rather than from unquestioning faith. So when one of "our own," such as this NPR woman, comes along ritually singing any teacher’s perfection, we can’t help feeling in some sense betrayed. We experience an almost instinctive revulsion at what seems the ancient error of idolatry. It matters little whether we be christian-bush.html”>christian-bush.html”>Christian, Jew, or Muslim, believer or non-believer. On any respectable twentieth-century ground, religious or secular, this order of teacher worship comes across as intellectual blasphemy.

But of what are we so proud? Where’s the evidence that our attitude toward teachers, teaching methodology, or education as a whole has anything to recommend it? In America, we can’t even teach a majority our children to read and write, let alone to understand basic mathematics. The latest government study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress concludes that "the typical American student is not a proficient writer." "Most Pupils Can’t Write Well" reports the New York Times (September 29, 1999):

Just 1 percent of the nation’s students scored in the "advanced" range, while 16 percent of 4th and 8th graders and 22 percent of 12th graders landed below "basic," unable to show even "partial mastery of the knowledge and skills" expected at their grade levels.

The bulk of students–61 percent of 4th graders, 57 percent of 8th graders and 56 percent of 12th graders–landed in the "basic" range, scoring from 115 to 175 out of 300.

Unfortunately, this is not news. These results are completely in line with those of prior reading skill studies conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Its 1993 assessment of 1975-1990 reading skill data indicated that 60% of high school seniors could not read "most newspaper stories and popular novels" and that fewer than 10% were even halfway to the "advanced" skill level required to "read newspaper editorials at the New York Times level" (Earl Hunt, Will We Be Smart Enough?, Russell Sage Foundation: New York, 1995). Numerous comparative studies of the mathematics skills of U.S. students and their peers in other industrial nations have produced even more dismal results.

As if our failure to teach our students to read, write, and do math weren’t bad enough, there is a growing movement among "educational experts" to rationalize our failure, providing reasons why we ought not measure institutional success or failure by the goal of teaching all students the skills that everyone admits are prerequisite to full political, social and economic participation in the 21st century. In public view, the ritual election campaign breast-beating about standards, assessment, and renewed commitment to education for all Americans goes on and on. But beneath the public rhetoric of crisis and crisis management, largely hidden in professional journals and publications aimed at education and labor policy makers, the more pessimistic, rationalization movement has been growing stronger every year.

On the more visible, conservative side of this movement of rationalized failure is the notorious The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1994). Herrnstein and Murray were roundly attacked for their "racist" propositions about IQ and their dismissal of programs designed to remedy performance gaps between whites and Asians, and blacks and Hispanics. But, conspicuously, the many rebuttals to their racial performance analysis steered clear of their more sweeping propositions. Few, apparently, wanted to address the general conclusions indicated by subtitle to The Bell Curve, which speaks not about race or ethnicity but sweepingly about "Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life." The ugly fact is that Herrnstein and Murray’s prognosis for the vast majority of whites and Asians on "the bell curve" is so bleak that it hardly matters from a broad societal perspective that white and Asian prospects are a shade better than those of blacks and Hispanics. This no one wants to address, at least not publicly, because Herrnstein and Murray’s generally bleak view of the future for all but the "best and brightest" regardless of race is a view also shared, albeit with greater hand-wringing, by their liberal policy-maker counterparts.

For example, Earl Hunt, an early and strong critic of The Bell Curve‘s methodology and conclusions with regard to race, nevertheless concludes his liberal Russell Sage Foundation study Will We Be Smart Enough? with the following reflections on the growing pessimistic consensus among policy makers:

The Times article was only one of many such reports that, taken together, raise a question that has to be faced. How many good jobs are there? Is it possible that we are wasting everyone’s time by trying to provide lots of well-trained people when we only need a few?

Three technological changes–computers, communications, and transportation–have combined to produce a workplace where there is an increasingly sharp demarcation between a few good jobs and a large number of mediocre ones. What each of these technologies does is to multiply the effectiveness of a smart person. If one person has an idea about how to run something, and if that idea can be translated into a computer program, then the idea can be instantly transferred all over the world. The need for local reinvention of the wheel, together with the need for local wheel designers, disappears. What follows is a sharp redistribution of wealth, since we pay a few designers handsomely and dispense with the rest.

The situation is exacerbated by international competition (Hunt, 284).

In many ways, Hunt’s liberal analysis is far more ominous than Herrnstein and Murray’s heavy-handed pandering to anxious white business climbers, especially those who’ve only just cleared the glass ceiling. In contrast, liberal Hunt speaks directly to and for those who own that ceiling:

Unfortunately, there has been little change in the percentage of readers at the adept and advanced skill level. In fact, the percentage of readers at the advanced level has declined slightly. It is not clear whether or not this is a problem. As Carroll points out, we do not know what percentage of very good readers we need, because we do not have a good idea of how much essential reading (manuals, directions, legal instructions, and the like) is written at the adept level or above, nor do we know how many people we need to understand this material (Hunt, 28; emphasis added).

Who is this "we" for whom it may not be a problem that few American citizens are capable of reading "manuals, directions, legal instructions, and the like," and that even fewer are capable of reading the New York Times? The significance of the Times here and the reason it appears so frequently in discussions and measurements of literacy is that the New York Times is the nation’s and to a great extent the world’s "paper of record." Its reportage, its analyses, its editorial and opinion pages are our most visible and accessible forum for public policy issues. What appears or does not appear in the New York Times is a matter of great consequence not just with respect to memory of what has happened but, more importantly, with respect to what may or may not happen in response to major issues and events. Who, then, is this "we" who may not need most American citizens to understand the nation’s and the world’s paper of record?

The answer is clear enough from the context in which the Times is invoked as a standard of advanced literary. One doesn’t have to be some kind of Marxist to figure out that "we" is about class, as even conservative Herrnstein and Murray are quite frank about it. "We" are those for whom the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, etc. are written so that "we" and our "running dogs," as the Maoists used to call the most educated and privileged "white collar" servants of speculative capital, might be informed adequately about what is going on in the world and the choices "we" face. "We" are those for whom books based on "academic" and "non-profit" policy studies are funded, written and published, despite the fact that few Americans can or do read them. "We" are those able to call personally upon the nation’s elected and appointed officials to address our issues seriously, not simply and cynically because "we" contribute directly and indirectly to their political campaigns, but because, as a matter of class, they already well know who and what "we" and our interests are. After all, they too are among the few who can and do read the New York Times. In sum, "we" are those who have the power to discover, to decide, and to advocate what is needed nationally and internationally to serve our interests.

And the rest of us? The rest of us, who don’t even count as a "we" in education and labor policy analysis, are a long way from Jefferson’s vision of a free, educated and independent electorate safe-guarding democracy and the rights of all from, as he put it, the narrow, selfish interests of an aristocracy of wealth.

So as the 2000 presidential election campaign heats up, it would be only prudent to remember this "we" whispering in the ears of every candidate as he or she promises the public tougher, higher standards and assessment, universal teacher testing, and ever-renewed commitment to educational excellence. Prudence requires remembering that this "we" only needs excellence from the top 1-2% and adequate performance from the next 10-20%, because computers, communications, and cheap, modern transportation can do the rest.

And prudence requires remembering that for the remaining 80% of the American population, this "we" only needs that it be kept off the streets: at home before the tube or at the movies silently watching advertisement and product placement; at work, at school or at the shopping mall dreaming endlessly of one day having more; or, if it comes down to it, safely locked away in prison, preferably a privately funded and profit-making one with government service contracts. And it helps this "we" no end that this residual, less productive 80% cannot effectively read the New York Times or any other serious publication where real policy is discussed. It helps that this 80% cannot write persuasively. It helps that this 80% is easily confused by the most basic mathematics of statistical and financial analysis.

Perhaps prudence also requires recalling the history of "educational crisis" in this country, specifically the extent to which every crisis has only led to a renewed and deeper pact of sorts between a scared and anxious public and an ever-increasing administrative apparatus of experts, commissions, and institutes promising to improve education by uprooting its traditions and making it more efficient, more cost-effective, more accountable, in short, more business-like. It may well be that we have been traveling down this road of making education more "business-like" for so long, with so little to show for it, that it’s time to notice what’s left out of this pact and what has been progressively undermined by it: the kind of ritual respect for teachers that seems so irritating in other and older systems of education.

Perhaps this ritual respect from students, parents, and the community at large is more essential than we have imagined or have been led to imagine. Could it be that the ritual itself, which in no way requires blindness to actual performance, is the only means of fostering in mere mortal human beings the degree of self-denying reverent care for students’ progress and potential that is the hallmark of great teachers? Perhaps what we haven’t noticed in our series of ever-deepening crisis pacts with administrators and experts is that once this ritual respect is gone, once its last vestiges have been thoroughly expunged from any educational system, nothing else in whatever measure can have any positive effect on educational quality.

Certainly, it is the experience of most teachers today, at every level of education, that "curriculum quality issues" have passed largely out of their hands, whatever they may be accomplishing individually in their own classrooms; that even tenure is no longer much of a protection from the most intrusive and disruptive forms of administrative harassment; and that, caught between the demands of paper and committee work designed to justify a burgeoning bureaucratic superstructure of administrators, experts and their unending "reforms" and, on the other side which is really the same side, "consumer-oriented" teaching assessments in which students are asked to sit judgment upon everything from their teachers’ academic attainments to their ability to adjust classroom thermostats, the act of teaching itself has come to resemble participation in some kind of grand twisted Gong Show. If you could get teachers to speak honestly–something it no longer pays to do in teaching–you’d discover that, win or lose, performance in our on-going educational Gong Show demands showmanship over substance. "Great teachers," of course, manage both–as if that were an excuse for the system harm of false priorities. "Good" or "great," there is hardly a surviving, practicing teacher today who would not also make a fine improv comedian, used car salesman, real estate broker, or happy-talk newscaster, because a "good teacher" today is necessarily an ever-nervous, juggling, jumping court jester, a professional fool whose combined abilities are "(E) All of the above."

In retrospect, I think most of my irritation with that woman singing homage to her guru’s infinite patience and wisdom on National Public Radio was not due to any deep cultural prejudice for Western critical intelligence, for the power and freedom of ever-inquiring doubt. I rather suspect that the primary source of my irritation was envy, simple envy and, of course, frustration. After eighteen years of teaching at institutions of higher education–and I was always very "well respected" by my students–I cannot imagine limits to the impossible feats of education and enlightenment I might have accomplished had I the leverage of the smallest fraction of that ritual respect accorded routinely in America to even the most sleazy New Age dream peddlers.

Sadly, change is not on the horizon. There is no public consensus or even widespread inkling that education might ideally accomplish more than certifying prospects for flexible global labor markets, aside, that is, from keeping kids from killing each other before they graduate. To judge by the rhetoric of our current presidential candidates, the Internet in every classroom, a metal detector at every door, and "we" may not have much of a problem with education as it is.

To teach today is to be assailed on all sides by such impossible, contradictory and demeaning demands that the only solution is to lie, to laugh, or to leave.

Rudyard Kipling’s oft-quoted aphorism, "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind," is truest when by "words" we understand the full repertoire of signs, symbols, gestures, visual and auditory representations that make for human communication and collective feeling and comprehension. Words in this largest sense, more powerfully than any of the opiates with which Kipling was familiar, bound and shape lived reality not by absolutely deafening us to what they do not speak but by progressively rendering us passive and indifferent to any experience, thought, feeling, or action that lies beyond the limited reality they can conjure for us or we can conjure with them.

If you doubt the power of words to shape the most basic of human realities; if you believe you choose and use words rather than they you–and you have a ruthless streak–try asking a young child who’s just old enough to grasp the meaning of the question, "What did you think before you could speak?" If understood, you will witness a silent confrontation with a loss of self, a primal terror of nothingness within and without, of language out of control, and a series of facial expressions that belong to no child, that have no age at all. And probably you will never be completely trusted again.

This power of words, in the largest sense, to bound and shape our most basic human realities is the reason we should be frightened by the wave upon wave of global corporate media mergers of the last two decades. Today’s announcement (September 8, 1999) of Viacom’s proposed buy out of CBS for $37.3 billion is only the most recent "biggest media merger ever" and marks the fall of the last independent American broadcasting network. NBC was bought by General Electric in 1985, and ABC by Disney in 1995. How long the Viacom/CBS deal will remain the record merger is very uncertain, because, as reported in the New York Times, the deal is likely "Act I in an Opus of Hollywood Deals":

"It will bring about a new wave of consolidations, make these companies even bigger," said David Geffen, a partner at the film and music company Dreamworks SKG. "It’s a very powerful merger. They always come in waves. Everyone becomes competitive."

Similarly, Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation of America, said in a telephone interview from New York, "After a deal like this, the urge to merge becomes feverish. And right now temperatures are soaring all over the city."

The only foreseeable limit on this prospective wave of mega-media mergers is not the FCC but that, for the first time in history, there’s almost no one of any size left to buy. "There’s a scarcity issue now," according to Jeff Logsdon, an entertainment analyst at Seidler Cos., quoted in the same NY Times article. Viacom and CBS will be asking the FCC to lift to 41% its 35% cap upon how much of the U.S. population any single broadcast network is allowed to reach. It appears likely the request will be granted. With the entire country so completely parceled out to so few broadcast/cable empires there seems little point in quibbling over 6% more or less for one of them.

The public danger here is not simply the traditional monopoly-bugaboo of corporations obtaining immunity from failure through total market domination, although this is a major motivation behind these mergers according to an executive guaranteed anonymity by the NY Times ("Act I in an Opus of Hollywood Deals") for speaking about these violations of at least the spirit of anti-trust law:

They’ve now created a company so big that the relative performance of next week’s new movie and next week’s television show is diminished. You’ve insulated the stock from weak performance…. You now have a bunch of businesses with more predictable earnings flow. This takes the volatility out of what you’re doing.

Neither is the public danger simply the traditional political paranoid’s fear of government (and corporate) propaganda, unchecked by significant independent news sources. There’s already so much of that kind of lying on a grand political scale that we should be well past worrying about more.

For example, in the same issue of the New York Times (September 8,1999), a backgrounder piece on the most recent round of terror in East Timor, entitled "Who is Behind the Carnage in East Timor and Why?" avoids all mention of well-documented U.S. complicity in Indonesia’s original invasion and in the subsequent 24 years of periodic massacre and systematic starvation and impoverishment of the indigenous population. There’s no mention of increased U.S. arms sales to Indonesia at the height of its genocidal campaigns, nor of U.S. blockage of U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Indonesia’s actions, nor of sweet World Bank and I.M.F. deals. Nor does the NY Times article find it worthwhile recalling to public attention the scandal of the last Presidential election when it was discovered that laundered Indonesian contributions had found their way into both Clinton’s and the GOP’s coffers. Although the very same issue of the NY Times (September 8, 1999) carries coverage of alleged Chinese contributions to Clinton’s last election campaign. Instead, we are told there is little that can be done and reassured that "though the carnage in East Timor arouses moral outrage, the territory is a tiny one with little international importance," which statement is true only if one forgets all the preceding and that within the last two years Indonesia finally managed to overcome international "moral outrage" and sell off the rights to develop East Timor’s off-shore oil reserves.

No, the larger public danger arises not from the media’s increased ability to sustain a lie but from the other principle motivation for the current media mergers: cross-marketing and cross-promotion. As the New York Times reports in its lead article, "Viacom Set to Acquire CBS in Biggest Media Merger Ever," the size and diversity of Viacom/CBS as a seller of advertising is more economically significant than its size as a media producer:

And perhaps even more significant than Viacom’s ascension to second-largest media company — with a stock market value of about $72 billion, compared with Time Warner’s $80.5 billion — Viacom could very likely emerge as the world’s largest seller of advertising.

Besides the television and radio properties, Viacom’s acquisition includes CBS’s pending deal to acquire the billboard giant Outdoor Systems Inc. Analysts estimate that a combined Viacom-CBS would generate $11 billion a year in advertising revenue — nearly twice that of the current leader, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which sells $5.8 billion in annual advertising.

The new size and diversity of its combined media holdings will allow Viacom/CBS to attempt cradle-to-the-grave saturation marketing and promotion across a very wide range of socio-economic and special interest audiences, constructing worlds of self-referentially in which, no matter which way the "target" turns, looks, or listens, he or she is either sold a product or lured to other Viacom/CBS media in which that product or another is also sold.

Of course, this kind of marketing has been attempted before. We see it’s most advanced development thus far in film and TV product placement and in the suborning of local and national newscast "human interest stories" and even hard news coverage to lend air-time to "blockbuster" film releases and "the new fall lineup." Certainly, the least we can expect of a Viacom/CBS is that the latest MTV pseudo-controversy over video and cartoon content will become more newsworthy than ever before in the eyes of CBS Nightly News producers, editors, and reporters.

But, in a larger view, it is impossible to anticipate fully the strategies and tactics likely to emerge in the next few years. We’ve seen only the beginning. Cross-marketing and cross-promotion, and especially the potential of the two combined, constitute a relatively new field only effectively opened by mergers on the unprecedented scale of Viacom/CBS or previous record holder Disney’s 1995 acquisition of ABC. No doubt a great many "gifted individuals" are already being extravagantly over-compensated to discover what works best in this brave new world. Take a good look at ABC programming and self-promotions these days: even its colors are turning Disney. We can only look forward to what the MTV geniuses will do for the NBC peacock.

If you’re thinking, "So what? There’s nothing new here," you should at least reflect on the fact that those who are engineering these mega-media mergers do not in the least share your opinion. They can recall the past accurately enough, as can the New York Times Business pages when that past suits its largely corporate-business readership. In "CBS and Viacom Hope for No Other Bidders" (September 8, 1999), the NY Times recalls,

The history of Viacom began in 1971, when it was spun off from, of all places, CBS. In those quaint days, it bothered people when companies owned too many media properties, and CBS, owner of one of the three major television networks, was forced by the Federal Communications Commission to unload its cable TV and syndication operations.

"Those quaint days" of restraint upon corporate media power in the residual public interest are gone. If as a result there’s now a scarcity of merger and acquisition candidates in Hollywood, we can expect relatively unregulated Silicon Valley to be the next great hunting ground. The search engines are ready prey. And, likely because Sony as a "foreign-owned" corporation is still quaintly barred from participating in any merger frenzy involving U.S. traditional broadcast media, Microsoft and Sony are certainly showing the way with their recent cross-promotion deal over Microsoft’s Windows Media and Sony’s extensive collection of film, video and music copyrights. After all, "technological convergence" is not consumer ease-of-use from a global marketing perspective. Fundamentally, it is the newly dawning realization that advertising real-estate is advertising real-estate, regardless whether it be in the theater, on TV, in books and magazines, plastered on billboards, popping up on the desktop, or coming soon to a refrigerator near you. And if you think all this makes no difference, there’s a massive industry raking in a global fortune off the fact that you are quaintly and quite plainly wrong.

The 21st century we are about to enter promises be one in which children grow up to adulthood and pass to old age thoroughly protected from such sadistic questions as "What did you think before you could speak?"–the ancient human formula, by the way, for creating a shaman, a priest, a philosopher-king, a Dalai Lama. Because, before they can either think or speak, their fundamental reality of words, signs, symbols, sights, and sounds will have been brilliantly strategized and orchestrated into an all-encompassing globe of trustworthiness by a mere handful of global corporate entities.

And it will be a smiling, benevolent world in which there appears little need to attach much significance to anything other than thinking and speaking, "I really, really need that, right now. I do, I do, I do need that! Please, tell me what I have to do–anything–to get it.

The Los Angeles Times (Saturday, August 28, 1999) reports good news for the global melting pot in two separate front page articles. In Tibet, despite the curious belief shared by young and old alike that only the return of the Dalai Lama "will make everything right in Tibet," there is hope because, according the Times, accusations of four decades of Chinese "’cultural genocide’ against the Tibetans" are false. "The truth is that Beijing appears willing to let the indigenous culture live on."

Meanwhile, in our own backyard, the Southwest Voter Leadership Academy is training the next generation of aspiring Latino-American leaders to take a "wider view" than their civil-rights era predecessors in a new "corporate style," "political boot camp." Showing its trainees the path to enlightenment, "Southwest Voter now boasts a research institute and a host of corporate sponsors such as Disney, Arco and AT & T." With this kind of tolerance and accommodation of diversity breaking out globally, we can look forward to the day sometime soon when East LA gangbangers will be peddling Lhasa gas franchises, long distance, in high squeaky, accentless voices.

Both Times articles are huge by newspaper standards–more than enough space for each writer to put a happy face on an old ethnic conflict. But enough is never enough. Somehow neither writer seems to have had space to place his story in any meaningful contemporary context, not even in the context of other running stories in the Los Angeles Times.

"In Tibet, Dalai Lama Remains People’s Choice" occupies 54 column inches, including two photographs. But after weeks of news about the Chinese crackdown on the Falun Gong movement, a crackdown just days ago extended to miniscule Protestant church groups, the reporter’s matter of fact reassurance of the government’s commitment to tolerance seems disoriented and confused: "The basic rule is that cultural expression–in manners, dress, customs and other practices–is generally permitted among China’s many ethnic minorities and religious groups as long as it does not challenge the state." In what world does this reporter live that the terms "basic," "generally" and "as long as" have any binding meaning for governments of any kind?

Perhaps we are to understand, without being told, that Falun Gong, which objectively can only be described as "dippy," actually poses a fundamental threat to bureaucratic state communism in China. Perhaps we are to understand, also without being told, that the Times reporter is simply parroting official Chinese government pronouncements as the price of operating in China. But neither explains the Los Angeles Times’ editorial decision to print the portions of this story relating the Chinese policy of using internal economic development, without western aid, to "buy Tibetan submission."

"’Economic development can solve most every problem,’ said Tang Wei, deputy director of Tibet’s foreign trade office. ‘And the problems are easier solved without foreign meddling,’ he added in a jab at the U.S. and other Western countries where the Dalai Lama is widely admired." Surely Deputy Director Wei is jabbing at the West. But, as he and presumably the report well know, China is receiving Western aid for Tibetan internal development, and Deputy Director Wei’s profession of faith in economic development and its ability to solve most every problem has a very different meaning than the one the Times lets stand in this article.

It is elsewhere in the Times that Deputy Direct Wei’s meaning becomes clear, but the reader has to hunt and to remember. For the last week, the Times has been running China stories about the misadventures of a professional linguist and a pro-Tibetan American activist named Dagamizu Meston: his activities, his various detentions, his injury escaping police, and finally his medical and diplomatic evacuation by the U.S. Embassy. Meston, now officially banned from China for five years, has been in Qinghai as part of a team investigating of all things a World Bank-backed project to resettle Chinese farmers on lands inhabited by Tibetans. It seems that with $160 million in World Bank financing the Chinese government is indeed willing "to let the indigenous culture live on" in Tibet, on smaller and smaller pieces of land, crowded closer and closer by ethnic Chinese. One would never suspect this from a reading of "Dalai Lama Remains People’s Choice." Of course, it’s important that one not suspect this, because ethnic Chinese resettlement in Tibet is very much what the Dalai Lama and other Tibetans mean when they accuse China of "’cultural genocide’ against the Tibetans," a charge the Times and its reporter completely dismiss in this article.

With such decontectualized reporting, it’s hard not to respond in kind and read out of context. In which case, the Los Angeles Times story drives one to conclude that the real problem in Tibet for those that matter–China and the World Bank–is the Dalai Lama. Or rather the problem is the Tibetans’ continued belief in him, which "transcends reason and economics," the fact of Chinese occupation and the inducements of the World Bank deal. Or perhaps, since the reporter repeatedly reminds us that the Chinese simply may be biding their time, the real problem is that the Dalai Lama has now joined Fidel Castro on the world stage and the problem is that we really can’t do business yet because, as the last words of Times article put it, "He’s not dead yet."

The Saturday Times other feature story, "A New Latino School for Politics Takes a Wider View," includes two photographs and spreads across three pages to total 89 column inches. It is similarly indifferent to relevant contemporary events reported in the Los Angeles Times, but without even the excuse of having been written under a regime of censorship. The views of "New Latino" candidates working "on winning mainstream votes while honoring activist roots" must be wide indeed to overlook the on-going Times reporting of the local El Monte police saga.

It seems that on August 9, 1999, an El Monte SWAT team of 20 officers raided the Compton home of one Mario Paz, "shot the front and back doors open as the family slept," and "shot in the back" and killed Mr. Paz, 65 years old. "The El Monte Police Department has no evidence that anyone in the family of Mario Paz…was involved in drug trafficking, nor did officers when they shot their way into the house in the nighttime raid," reports the latest Los Angeles Times follow-up story, on the same August 28 front page as its happy-face "New Latino School" story.

There can be little doubt that in publishing "A New Latino School for Politics Takes a Wider View" the Los Angeles Times felt a kind of civic obligation to keep a lid on things, encouraging its Latino readers also to "take a wider view" of the El Monte affair. The kind of "wider view" required may be indicated by one of the article’s two photographs. It depicts three young Latinos on their knees, groping about in the grass and air, engaged in a supposed "leadership exercise." The caption reads, "Blindfolded, they try to form a perfect triangle." Stranger than fiction, the photo recalls Ralph Ellision’s jab at the training of aspiring black leaders at white-financed "Negro Colleges":

It’s so long ago and far away that here in my invisibility I wonder if it happened at all. Then in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father figure, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly into place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. (Invisible Man, Random House: New York, 1952)

In the El Monte affair, the Times good-citizen effort to blindfold its Latino readers was probably not necessary. In this age of "visual readers," the lack of camcorder footage effectively blindfolds nearly everyone, making it highly unlikely that Mario Paz’s unjustifiable death could ever provoke the near-universal outrage that Rodney King’s mere beating did.

Things get curiouser and curiouser when one considers the front-page publication of both the Tibet and New Latino stories. One’s forced to wonder for how many different kinds of things, and how often, the LA Times feels obliged to keep a lid on, globally speaking. And who are the global citizens on whose behalf the Times is so good? There’s no doubt about its method. The Los Angeles Times does not fail to report the news. It does not fail to report it, in a sense, objectively. But it reports the news in such decontextualized, disorienting, fragmentary fashion that the general impression upon readers is one of hopeless confusion in the state of the nation and the world. This seems good. This seems bad. This makes me happy. This makes me sad. Which one of these things doesn’t go with the others? But why bother figuring out what’s really what and why? It’s too complicated, too much work. I’d rather read the Los Angeles Times "Saturday Journal." The Los Angeles Times "Saturday Journal" for August 28, 1999, was entitled "For Good or Ill, Spitting Happens."

Of course, the Los Angeles TImes is not alone in this practice. If once upon a time, media critics could accuse, with some justification, the national media of functioning to shape public thought in line with U.S. government policy, such is no longer the case or no longer simply the case. The major national media, in this following the lead of local television, primetime "news journals," and infotainment shows, now seem to function largely only to addle and confuse. Bottomline: that’s what best holds viewers and readers. Perhaps it’s only incidental that it also keeps a lid on things: it’s what best renders viewers and readers passive and ineffective.

In any event, addle and confuse is also what the Southwest Voter Leadership Academy seems to be about. "Anyone who wants to get beyond that glass ceiling has to become a more assimilated candidate… You can’t speak with an accent and must constantly reassure people you have common, mainstream, middle-class values." "Always stay on your message… The biggest mistake you can make is to stray from your message. You write the headline. You control the agenda." "Skin color and language should mean nothing… A good leader is committed to serving anyone who is honest and hard working." "If you want to get the mayor to do something, talk to his circle of influence, to people he’ll listen to." "Networking is extremely important. I meet 10 to 20 new people each time. That means 10 to 20 new business cards." "’Remember, there are no permanent enemies and no permanent allies’ in politics."

These and other mantras the participants in the Southwest Voter Leadership Academy repeat to each other day after day, isolated at the Glorietta christian-bush.html”>christian-bush.html”>Christian Mediation Center in the desert of New Mexico, "sharing dimly lighted double rooms furnished with just two beds, a shower stall and a toilet," cut off "with no transportation outside the compound," "no television, limited phone access and little time to eat their cafeteria meals, usually dry fish dinners or soggy burgers seemingly out of a public school free lunch program."

It’s too bad the Chinese government isn’t here to crackdown on this whitewash public relations cult, but no wonder that it’s being funded through Southwest Voter by Disney, Arco and AT & T, and reported glowingly by the Times Mirror Company. Certainly, none of these corporate giants need much reminding that Latinos will not be a numerical minority in California much longer, however much the Southwest Voter Leadership Academy seems devoted to training young Latino activists to forget it.

No permanent enemies and no permanent allies?

That’s a glorious and perhaps true proposition in the plenitude of time and eternity contemplated by religious believers. But in the here and now of real world politics, it’s the credo of a brand of machiavellianism of which even Machiavelli was not guilty. For this political world, on behalf of Latinos, Tibetans and all others, ourselves included, who are similarly situated in relation to the powerful, faceless likes of Disney, Arco, AT & T, the World Bank, the Chinese government, the Times Mirror Company, we’d be better advised to start a permanent enemies list, before all our beautiful and wicked individual and cultural differences are melted away….