Culture:

Reader at Large: September 17–October 8, 2021

by David Goodman | October 11, 2021
7 min read

Editor’s Note: The Sun’s Reader at Large, a.k.a. David Goodman, dedicates his leisure to reading voraciously and eclectically about politics, government, society, culture and literature. Every two weeks or so, the Sun will post for your pleasure and edification the Reader’s digest (pun intended) of some of the best and most thought-provoking articles, books and podcasts that Goodman has recently enjoyed. Please note that the italicized text is quoted and that some of the linked articles may be in publications that impose a pay wall. Neither the Sierra County Sun nor the Reader at Large endorses all the views expressed in the featured books and articles.

LITERATURE

"Elisabeth Costello" book coverFirst, a postscript to my mention in my Sept. 16 column about my high expectations for Colson Whitehead’s new novel “Harlem Shuffle,” which I had then just begun to listen to. My high expectations were fulfilled. The novel, which takes place in Harlem in the early 1960s, tells a captivating story of a man’s life and struggles to survive economically and morally, and it captures a rich and complex time and place. It abounds with memorable characters, and in the Audible version, the reader Dion Graham impressively creates a distinctive voice for each of them.

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As I have mentioned before in this column, I am a fan of the podcast Backlisted, almost every episode of which prompts me to read a book I had not known of, often by an author I had not known of. A recent episode focused on the novel “Elizabeth Costello” by the South African Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. Though I had read and admired his novels “Disgrace” and “Waiting for Barbarians,” I had not known of “Elizabeth Costello.” Coetzee wrote it in 2003, but many of its themes remain intensely timely. As the Backlisted hosts state, it is a “novel that politely asks the reader to consider, amongst other matters, animal rights, the power of faith and the limits of fiction itself.” I would add the decline of academic discourse to that list.  Though Coetzee uses the novel for some heady discussions of topics of interest to him (especially cruelty to animals), he also creates a vivid portrait of the title character, herself a novelist.

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I had already been inclined to read the new novel “The Magician” by Colm Tóibín, and the New Yorker’s publication in its September 20 issue of D.T. Max’s piece, “How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head,” clinched it. Tóibín had first won me over with his novel “The Master,” based on the life of Henry James, and I loved the play based on his “The Testament of Mary” and the movie based on his “Brooklyn.” My reverence for Thomas Mann goes back to my college years, so I was eager to see Tóibín do with Mann’s life in “The Magician” what he had done with James’s in “The Master.” I have only begun reading it, but I am already enjoying it greatly.

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Angela Merkel and Germany
Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel steps down after 16 years as Germany’s chancellor, having proven that effective politics does not require shedding humanity. Photograph by Christoph Braun courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Throughout her sixteen years as Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel has been the world leader for whom I have had the highest regard; often, the drop to second-place choice has been huge. As she prepares to leave office, several articles have sought to summarize her career and her legacy. These were two of the better ones I read:

New York Times (NYT) (9/13/21) : “Angela Merkel Was Underestimated, and It Became Her Superpower” by Serge Schemann
Her real legacy is the evidence that effective politics need not mean shedding humanity or steadfastness, and that being underestimated may be the true key to political longevity.

NYT (9/25/21): “Affluent, Anxious and Almost Normal: A Journey Through Merkel’s Germany by Katrin Bennhold
As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Ms. Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater. To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed.

Our Constitutional Crisis

Washington Post (9/23/31): “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here” by Robert Kagan
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom—such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.

The Environment and Decluttering

As I approach my seventieth birthday next year, my impulse to get rid of accumulated stuff grows stronger. Apparently, the pandemic heightened that impulse in many others. In the article “Pandemic Decluttering” (NYT, 10/8/21), author Joanne Kaufman writes:

Covid sent the nation into lockdown. Stuck within their own four walls, people began pondering such existential questions as “Why do I have seven Pyrex loaf pans?” and “What are the odds that I’ll ever get into those size 2 jeans again?” Like Ms. Meredith [a declutterer described in the article], they frequently found relief, if not necessarily answers, in a Swedish death cleanse, perhaps more to the point, in a bored-to-death cleanse. But for many, decluttering was a practical necessity. Suddenly, home was no longer simply haven and shelter. It was also an office (sometimes multiple offices), a school, perhaps even a gym, requiring extra equipment and furniture—requiring a rethinking and reapportioning of space. To accommodate those changes something had to give, and a lot had to go.

For those like me who had been unfamiliar with the concept, the article “What Is Swedish Death Cleaning?” by Ashley Knierem (The Spruce, 12/18/20) explains: “Swedish death cleaning is a method of organizing and decluttering your home before you die to
lessen the burden of your loved ones after you’ve passed.”

landfill waste
The flip side of sparking joy by decluttering: the 150 million tons of waste that Americans send to landfills every single day. Source: openaccessgovernment.org

Decluttering generally makes me feel virtuous, but a recent article by Susan Shain in the Mic Check newsletter, “Decluttering is bad for the planet. Here’s how to do it sustainably” (8/19/21) gave me a helpful reminder that the ways in which we declutter may be more or less harmful to the environment, and it provides some useful suggestions for better approaches.

Picture your neighborhood garbage truck. Got it in your mind? Now picture 29,000 of them, lined up end to end, stretching from Sacramento to San Jose, California. Then, finally, picture all those trucks, brimming with trash and dumping it all in a landfill, every single day. In the United States, that’s not hyperbole; it’s reality. Every year, we send nearly 150 million tons of waste to the landfill—an amount equal to roughly 2.5 pounds of trash per person, per day. In 2018, that included 9 million tons of clothing and shoes, 9.6 million tons of furniture, and 1.6 million tons of small appliances. That’s bad news for the planet, considering landfills account for 12% of global emissions of methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas responsible for at least a quarter of today’s global warming.

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HAVE YOU SEEN?

Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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