Waiting out the whiners

So now the members of Yokel Haram currently occupying the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon have decided to further erode any support they may have had by rifling through 4,000 irreplaceable artifacts of the Paiute Tribe, and bulldozing a line around the refuge building's property without any consideration of archaeologically sensitive sites.

"I’ve gotten calls from ranching families who support the tribe," tribe chairperson Charlotte Roderique said.  "They’ve seen the [Paiute] campsites out there.  They’ve been in that area and they know where things are.  You can’t go and bulldoze things.  I don’t know what these people are doing, if they are doing things to just get a rise or to be martyr—all they are doing is making enemies out of the people they professed to support."

One of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, posted a video of himself pawing through the artifacts, and tried to cast it as concern over how the artifacts were being stored.  "We want to make sure these things are returned to their rightful owners and that they’re taken care of,” Finicum said.  "This is how Native Americans’ heritage is being treated.  To me, I don’t think it’s acceptable."

The Natives themselves don't seem to have that attitude.  "I got a question for the world," said Jarvis Kennedy, Burns Paiute Tribal Council member.  "What would happen if it was Natives out there taking over the building?  Or any federal land?  What would the outcome be?  Think about it.  What would happen?  Would they let us come into town to get supplies?  We as Harney County residents can stand on our own feet.  We don’t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.  We survived without them before, we'll survive without them when they're gone.  So they just need to get the hell out.  We didn't ask for them here, we don't want them here.  They say they don't want to bother the community, but our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be at school.  They're scaring our people.  They need to go home.  We don't need them."

Ammon Bundy [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Kind of unequivocal, isn't it?  Of course, statements from Paiute leaders are likely to have no effect, given the fact that Ammon Bundy and his crew seem to have the idea that laws are more like strongly-worded suggestions, and any time someone says "You can't do that," it directly contravenes the Constitution, and probably the Word of God as well.  

The thing is, their whole stance is a sham right from the outset.  Their claims that they're doing what they do because they're concerned about the rights of citizens to their own property are shown as the lies they are by their actions.  Jacqueline Keeler, over at Indian Country Today Media Network, told us how much concern these people have for others' property:

Carla Burnside, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's archaeologist at the refuge, has told the tribe that she has seen pictures in news reports of militants sitting in her office, even at her desk with files open that contain sensitive information about archaeological sites belonging to the tribe.

And as far as their claims of respecting Native lands and artifacts, that's bullshit, too.  Keeler writes:

Bundy supporters have damaged Native American archaeological sites before, most notably, when they drove ATVs through a canyon trail in Utah in protest of protected federal lands trampling the ruins of homes belonging to the ancient Puebloans.  Also, the Southern Paiute tribes in Nevada have accused the Bundy family of defacing ancient Paiute petroglyphs in Gold Butte.

These are the kind of people who should have access to archaeological sites and a vital wildlife refuge in the name of protecting private interests?

And another thing: we need to stop calling these scofflaws a "militia."  Their favorite Constitutional Amendment, the Second, talks about a "well-regulated militia."  But regulated by whom?  Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution says the following about militias:

The Congress shall have Power To... provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;  [and]

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

Did you catch that bit about a true militia being overseen by Congress?  That's a pretty important bit.

These aren't militiamen.  These are butthurt whiners who resent any legal incursion into their being able graze their cattle wherever they want to for free.  They don't want justice; they want carte blanche to flout whatever laws they find inconvenient, and no costs or consequences.  Furthermore, they're hypocrites.  They rail against the welfare state and "government handouts" while accepting government loan money to the tune of $530,000, and still want to appear to be the wronged party.

But given that they are heavily armed butthurt whiners, the government has (understandably) not been eager to step in and create a bunch of Waco-style martyrs for the cause.  No one doubts that these people would fire if they felt threatened, and more than one of them has stated his willingness to die rather than surrender.  So the authorities are playing a waiting game, while the costs for the extra security and monitoring of the standoff are running into the tens of thousands of dollars a day -- a cost that Harney County judge Steve Grasty has stated is going to be billed to the Bundy family.

So I understand why the feds aren't storming the castle.  But man, it just pisses me off that a bunch of petulant children with big guns can simply waltz in and take over public land (public, you know?  Meaning owned in trust for all of us?), and everyone simply stands around waiting.

My solution would be to block the (government-maintained) roads so they can't get out, stop the (government-provided) mail service, and cut the (government-managed) electricity and water to the refuge headquarters.  See how long they last in an eastern Oregon January with no help from the people they claim are the pinnacles of evil in our society.

Orson Scott Card, and separating creator from creation

Today I'm going to ask a question that I'm not at all certain I have an answer to:  Is it possible to separate creative people from their works, especially in cases where the work is good but the creators themselves are reprehensible?  Or outright crazy?

I bring this up, of course, because of Orson Scott Card, whose book Ender's Game is brilliant, but who personally seems to be a grade-A wingnut.

First, we had the revelation that Card had served for years on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an organization whose entire raison d'être is opposing gay marriage.  (He quietly resigned in 2009, possibly because he knew that it would result in bad press for the upcoming movie version of his book.)  The story came out anyway, of course, as did homophobic vitriol he'd written that included the following [Source]:

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

He still refers to the gay marriage question as requiring the "radical redefinition of marriage," which I find wryly amusing, given that he's a devout Mormon.

Be that as it may, his anti-homosexual opinions are sadly commonplace.  Not so his more recently revealed opinions, which move him from "narrow-minded right-winger" directly into the "card-carrying loony" column.  Because now Card is now claiming that there is a leftist conspiracy to trash the Constitution and turn President Obama into an emperor [Source]:

Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing "czars" who didn't need Senate approval. His own party hasn't passed a budget ever in the Senate.

In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt...

Michelle Obama is going to be Barack's Lurleen Wallace. Remember how George Wallace got around Alabama's ban on governors serving two terms in a row? He ran his wife for the office. Everyone knew Wallace would actually be pulling the strings, even though they denied it. Michelle Obama will be Obama's designated "successor," and any Democrat who seriously opposes her will be destroyed in the media the way everyone who contested Obama's run for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was destroyed.

How will Obama accomplish all of this? By hiring gang members as his personal hit men, of course:

Where will he get his "national police"? The NaPo will be recruited from "young out-of-work urban men" and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.

In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people "trying to escape" -- people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

All righty, then. I guess that's clear enough.

What is a bit perplexing is how little of this nuttiness comes through in Ender's Game, a book that is rightly popular and is (in fact) required reading in 10th grade English classes in the high school where I teach.  How could someone who has so clearly gone off the deep end can write a book as morally complex as this one?   (I know more than one person who is boycotting the movie, largely because of a desire not to put more money in the hands of a person who has such repellent ideas.)

Of course, Card is hardly the only author whose odd personal life has given readers pause.   Robert Heinlein, whose Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers are classics of science fiction, was during his life a peculiar mix of forward-thinking and reactionary. (What other nudists who supported Free Love can you think of who worked on the Barry Goldwater campaign?)

And of course, you get into even deeper water when you throw actors, artists, and musicians into the mix.  I know one person who can't even watch a Tom Cruise movie because of his role in suppressing negative press for the Scientologists.  I have less of a problem here, because when Cruise is on the screen, he's playing someone else, after all.  (There's still the difficulty of bankrolling someone who is morally reprehensible -- I do get that.)

So, it's a question worth asking.  Do the repulsive and (frankly) counterfactual beliefs of people like Orson Scott Card give us a reason to avoid their creations, even if those creations have their own merit?  To what extent can you separate the creation from the creator?  I suspect, from personal experience, that this may not even be possible. In addition to writing Skeptophilia I write fiction, and it is undeniable that my views of the universe have a way of creeping in -- however much I try to make the characters their own people, with their own worldviews and their own motivations.  And sometimes it works better than others.  For example, I deliberately tried to shake up my own sensibilities when I wrote the novella Adam's Fall -- the point-of-view character is an elderly and devout Anglican clergyman, and (I think) a highly sympathetic and complex man. The separation isn't quite so clear in other cases, though, and when a friend read my novel Signal to Noise, she said about the main character, "Um... you do realize that Tyler Vaughn is you, don't you?"

I'd be interested to hear what my readers think about this question, particularly apropos of the homophobia and conspiracy-theory aspects of Orson Scott Card's beliefs.  Do these diminish your enjoyment of his fiction?  Or stop you from reading it entirely?  Should it matter what sort of personal life an author or artist (or, for that matter, a scientist) leads?  Should it matter that geneticist James Watson thinks that Africa will never amount to much because "their intelligence is [not] the same as ours"?  Does the child molestation conviction of biologist Carleton Gajdusek decrease the worth of his research into the etiology of mad cow disease, research that led to protocols that have undoubtedly saved lives?  Does it make a difference that Isaac Newton, the "father of mathematical physics," was a narrow-minded religious fanatic who spent his spare time poring the bible for secret messages so he could figure out when the Antichrist was coming to Earth?

Myself, I think this just points up something that bears remembering: humans are complex. We are all combinations of good and bad -- some of us, really good and really bad.  What positive things we might accomplish don't excuse us from the repercussions of our darker sides, of course; but perhaps we should stop being surprised when they occur in the same person.

Maybe the problem here is our desire for clear-cut heroes and villains.  People are never two-dimensional, however easier it might make the world if they were.  Realistically, we shouldn't expect them to be.  When we are surprised at how odd, and seemingly self-contradictory, the human mind can be, perhaps it's our assumptions that are at fault.

Glenn Beck, liberal indoctrination, and public schools

It's nice when your intuition is right, every once in a while.

Last week, Glenn Beck's media outlet The Blaze reported on a story out of Jacksonville, Florida.  The upshot of it was that a parent of a child who attends Cedar Hills Elementary School was "furious" to find the following note amongst his child's school work:

The father was horrified about the apparent liberal indoctrination going on here, so he checked with other parents of kids in the same class, and found that those children, too, had written the sentence down on a piece of paper.

So the dad contacted The Blaze, and the story broke.  Soon the district and the teacher who was identified as responsible, Cheryl Sabb, were receiving threats.  It flew around the internet, especially on Facebook -- a posting of it I saw had garnered over 14,000 hits, and comments such as, "I HATE those goddamn liberal public schools.  We should shut them all down," and "That teacher should be fired tomorrow, and so should the administrators who let this happen."

Anyhow, I read this, and the entire time I was thinking, "This can't be right."  Most of us teachers simply don't have time to proselytize even if we had the inclination.  And in a fourth-grade class?  Something seemed wrong here.  But as befits my stance as a skeptic, I wasn't just going to write a post and say, "Hey, this doesn't feel right to me" when I didn't have any evidence to support my point.

Lo and behold, though, I was right.  The firestorm of controversy that was generated by the story led to an investigation, and the upshot of it was that damn near the entire story reported in The Blaze was flat-out wrong.

The identified teacher, Cheryl Sabb, had nothing to do with it.  The note was part of a civics lesson on constitutional rights given to a class by a local attorney, who had instructed the children to write the sentence on a piece of paper -- and then state their opinion as to whether they agreed or disagreed with it, and craft an argument supporting their viewpoint.

Several things about this debacle appall me.  One is that no one in the chain of communication in the original story -- the father, the reporter who was contacted, the editor who approved the story for publication -- thought to do the one thing that seems ridiculously obvious to me, which is: call the teacher and find out for sure what happened.  Even the kid was apparently too dumb to understand the point of the assignment -- the whole thing could have been avoided if the kid had simply said, "No, dad, that's not what the lesson was about."  And then, The Blaze published a "followup" (it's linked at the top of the page for the original story) instead of doing what they should have done, which is publishing a retraction.  Isn't that what responsible news sources do when they screw up royally?

Oh, wait.  We're talking about The Blaze.  Never mind.

And of course, the damage is done.  Hardly anyone is circulating the actual correct information; this allows the people who hate public schools, who think they're little Liberal Indoctrination Camps, to go on living in their fantasy world.  Glenn Beck and his cronies at The Blaze have nothing to gain by retracting the story; they've long been virulently against public education, and if the reputation of the public school system was damaged by their false reporting, so much the better.

It leads me to wonder how much longer public schools will be able to survive.  Between funding cuts, increasing mandates from state agencies (including adding more worthless standardized tests), and external attacks on teachers, it's a wonder any college student in his or her right mind would choose to go into teaching.  I'm nearing the end of an (all things considered) happy career as a secondary-level science teacher, but if I were in college now, I wouldn't even consider teaching as an option.  It's a hard enough job to do well at the best of times, but with the recent changes, it's becoming next to impossible.  Some school districts can't find qualified applicants for job openings, leading them to eliminate positions, bump up class sizes, and (in some cases) hire uncertified individuals to teach children.  The result: quality goes down, criticisms increase, schools receive more pressure to change, and the whole thing goes into an ever-faster downward spiral.

I fear that the ultimate result will be the demolition of the entire system.

Which I'm sure that Glenn Beck would applaud.  But I hope he realizes what he's asking for.  Public schooling in the United States, for all of its flaws, has been an amazingly successful social experiment.  It started from the standpoint that (1) a general, broad-based education is good for everyone, and (2) all children should have the opportunity to learn, both of which ran counter to the earlier idea that only rich kids needed to be educated, and that the lower social and economic tiers were irredeemably stupid in any case.  And I would argue that our society has benefited tremendously from this experiment -- the amount of creative talent wasted in earlier centuries by the decision not to offer education to most of the boys and almost all of the girls is one of the tragedies of our past.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am no apologist for the Department of Education; I think that many of their decisions, apropos of the oversight of the school system, are downright destructive.  But the way to effect change here is not to tear down the edifice itself.  It's to use what we've learned about successful pedagogy from the people who know -- the teachers -- to guide policy, to improve the system from the inside out.

But that's not what Glenn Beck et al. want to do.  Their continual lobbing of verbal bombs at the school system has, as its aim, breaking the power of unions and remodeling teaching on conservative principles.  (Recall that the actual, verbatim stance of the Texas Republican party is that they "oppose the teaching of higher-order thinking skills, values clarification, (and) critical thinking... which have the purpose of challenging students' fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.")  And judging by the reactions I saw to the civics lesson in Jacksonville, Beck and his followers are succeeding.

I just hope that I'll be retired before the entire system collapses.

Establishing a state religion

There is something going in on North Carolina right now that I bet a lot of you haven't heard about.  It's gotten barely any press coverage, which is weird, because if it doesn't scare the absolute hell out of you, you're not thinking hard enough.

A bill, filed by two Republican lawmakers from Rowan County on Monday (and backed by nine others), had as its intent to supersede the United States Constitution with respect to the establishment of a "state religion."  The bill was written by Representatives Carl Ford (R-China Grove) and Harry Warren (R-Salisbury), and says, in part,

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Backers claim that the bill is in response to President Obama's moves to establish universal health care and to alter gun laws, and they characterize it as fighting "federal tyranny."

Now, before you start writing letters, allow me to mention that this bill died yesterday afternoon in committee.  But the fact that it got as far as it did is like a dash of cold water down my back.  And if you think that this is a feint, or a political move intended just to "send a message," consider what Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, had to say about the bill: "[I]t is attempting to appease to a certain base of supporters here in Rowan County, but also probably throughout the state, that believe very firmly in the needs for religious liberty."

Now wait, Dr. Bitzer, let me get this straight: allowing North Carolina to establish an official state religion, and thus compel prayers in schools, prayers before governmental functions, and (presumably) state control over what can and cannot be taught in science classrooms, is a move toward religious liberty?  Can I just take a moment to remind you of what theocracies are actually like?

Because a move toward a Christian theocracy is what this is, of course.  No one in his or her right mind believes that all religions in North Carolina will be given equal respect.  This is just the old "America is a Christian nation" thing, rebranded as some kind of fight against the power of the federal government.  Take a look, for example, at the billboard campaign that has begun, in support of this move:

Many local churches have been vocal in their support of the bill, and vow to continue the fight now that this iteration of it will not be voted on.  "It's very exciting," minister Bill Godair of Cornerstone Church in Salisbury told WBTV on Wednesday.  "I was thrilled about it...  I know this money could have been given to the poor and I feel like we do so much and I feel like we elected these men, the fact that they're standing together unified, all five of them, I just feel like that we have to stand with them."

I find the whole thing profoundly frightening.  In this time, when there are large, organized, well-funded private groups that have as their official goal mandating the infiltration of religion into every aspect of our lives -- determining what we can do with our own bodies, how we have to teach our children, what we can and cannot say in public -- that this sort of thing is now being considered by government officials is horrifying.

And for those of my readers who are yourselves Christian, I hope you have the sense to recognize why this would be a terrible move.  Because, after all, it's not like Christianity is one thing; it is a diverse system of belief, a term that encompasses everything from the liberal, bible-as-metaphor approach of the Unitarian Universalists to the hard-as-nails biblical fundamentalism of the Pentecostals.  (Notwithstanding the fact that some of these sects say about the others that they are "not true Christians.")  So, if there's to be a state religion, which one?  If you take just that parts they all agree on, there won't be much left.  One of them has to be chosen as the actual state religion -- which should rightly terrify members of the others.

In any case, keep an eye on North Carolina, and other states in the "Bible Belt."  This fight isn't over yet.  And for those atheists, rationalists, agnostics, and freethinkers who somehow survive down there -- speak up.  Now.

Before it's too late.