Texas’ kids to be instructed by “Christian vegetables”

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OH MY. Those red states sure do get wacky.


From this morning’s LA Times: Texas may require schools to carry elective on Bible:

The Lone Star State could become the first in the nation to require all public high schools to offer an elective course on the Bible.

Hearings continued in the Legislature last week on a bill that calls for school districts in Texas to offer a class on "the history and literature of the Old and New Testaments eras" ….

The bill was written by state Rep. Warren Chisum, a West Texas Republican who teaches Sunday school at a Baptist church. He said the course would not treat the Bible as a "worship document" but would promote religious and cultural literacy by "educating our students academically and not devotionally."

…"The fear is that teachers with limited training and no guidance will be called upon to teach a course for which their experience draws largely from Sunday school," [Texas Freedom Network’s Kathy] Miller said….

A study conducted for her group by Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, found that of Texas' 25 public school districts with a Bible course, 22 districts' offerings had a Christian slant.

…[Chancey] said one teacher showed students a PowerPoint presentation titled "God's Road Map for Your Life." Included was a slide called "Jesus Christ Is the One and Only Way." Another teacher taught students that NASA had found a missing day and time that corresponded to a biblical story of the sun standing still. One school showed "VeggieTales" videos, which feature computer-animated Christian vegetables that talk….

…"It just makes sense to use the Bible if that's the course that you're talking about," [Rep. Chisum] said. "It's the most available book in the world."

…Chisum is chairman of the state House Appropriations Committee, the second most powerful position in the chamber. … In February, Chisum circulated an anti-evolution-education memo from a Georgia legislator that contained links to a website that alleged international Jewish conspiracies. Chisum later apologized….

International Jewish conspiracies? Didn’t we have a trustee once here in the district who was seriously up-to-speed on that stuff? Think so!

Silverado Canyon pics

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In the OC Register, photographer BRUCE CHAMBERS explores lovely Silverado Canyon. Check it out.


As you know, the Dissent Commune is located in the Santa Ana Mountains, which comprise Modjeska, Black Star, Trabuco, and Silverado Canyons, among others.

Trainspotting in Irvine (Jeffrey Rd.)

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Fear and loathing an' high wages

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A CULTURE OF FEAR

This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about Charles B. Wang, the founder and former chairman of a software company. The company’s board just issued a report that accuses Wang of overseeing an accounting fraud that lasted ten years.

According to the report, Mr. Wang was tyrannical and unscrupulous:

Mr. Wang created a “culture of fear” at Computer Associates—now called CA—and deliberately put inexperienced executives in senior positions so that he would have more control, according to the report. He discouraged executives from meeting with each other and arbitrarily fired managers or employees who disagreed with him…“Fraud pervaded the entire CA organization at every level, and was embedded in CA’s culture, as instilled by Mr. Wang, almost from the company’s inception,” the report said.

THE RAG GOO MONSTER


Gosh, that reminds me of the SOCCCD, albeit mostly the SOCCCD of yore.

I said “mostly.” Lately, we’ve been hearing that our own Charles Wang—Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur—has been on a tear, wagging that finger and popping those veins at everyone—at everyone except, of course, his “bosses,” the trustees.

Have you seen the ashen faces, the wide eyes, the peculiar diffidence and scared-shitlessness?

If you aren’t paying attention, Mathur can seem pretty reasonable, even charming, for a while. But if you hang around him long enough—and if you aren’t one of his “bosses”—you’ll eventually see his dark side. At such times, all his blather about “respect” and “not pointing a finger at others” flies out the window. He’s a Tasmanian Devil, a monster.

Nobody ever believes in the fabled Rag Goo Monster—until, that is, they actually witness it. There are many skeptics. On the other hand, over the years, many have witnessed the fiend, and they all bear the scars of their encounter.

Reportedly, these days, Mathur’s not just on a tear; he’s on a tear to end all tears. The monster has returned for the bloodiest sequel of all.

Don’t know why.

I keep hearing that faculty leaders and administrators of our benighted district are suddenly on Mathur's shitlist. Tenured faculty don't need to worry about that too much. Administrators do.

If you're vulnerable, you don't wanna be prey for the Rag Goo Monster. It's a horrible fate. Something happens. The monster then grows quiet. He slips into darkness. He sweats and stinks and yowls hideously.

Awful semi-rational Mathurian calculations then ensue.

PLAQUES


Last week, a friend wondered aloud why Wayne Ward, IVC’s former Director of F&M, received a plaque from the board of trustees. “I mean, he only worked here for two years!” said the friend. “He was nothing but trouble the whole time! Lots of grievances against him were working their way through the system,” he added.

Yes, the plaque episode was odd. I said as much. My friend then asked: “Do you think that you or I would get a plaque if we quit?"

I recalled a moment several years ago, when Mathur was still President of Irvine Valley College. A year or so before, he had hired Rod Poindexter as dean of Health Sciences, PE and Athletics, passing over a much more qualified candidate (natch, she’s now suing Mathur for discrimination). Almost immediately, Poindexter had proven to be a disaster, committing a series of outrageous blunders, clashing noisily and repeatedly with employees. Eventually, he would be dismissed after a series of embarrassing news reports about violent altercations and ugly lawsuits.

I happened to be in the PE building. Poindexter was still the dean, but his incompetence and volatility were by then legendary. I looked at the glass case in the hallway. For a moment, I was amazed at what I spotted there. It was an award, a trophy.

IVC’s student government had chosen Poindexter as its “administrator of the year”!


In those days, owing to Mathur’s ascendency, faculty assumed (with justice in some cases) that fraud tainted at least some awards processes, especially those associated with IVC’s student government. At the time, the student government president was close to Mathur (the fellow has since gone on to various minor posts in Republican politics; these days, he serves on IVC’s Foundation board). He was notorious for doing Mathur’s bidding.

At one point, the kid wrote a letter to the Times, commending “Raghu Mathur for four years of superb service to the college as president.” According to the student, IVC had been beset, not by a tyrannical rights-violating college president, but by “rebel faculty…and a small number of students” who “have tried to make our campus a war zone by using hate literature….”

Hate literature? That was a reference to Dissent, which Mathur had publicly condemned in just those terms.

I wrote the student a letter. Referring to his accusations, I wrote:

I hereby request that you show me exactly what it is that I have written or published that constitutes “hate literature.” If I…or some unnamed person or persons…[are] to be publicly charged with “using hate literature” by you, surely you are obliged to provide evidence…I await your response.

Naturally, I never heard from the fellow.

Perhaps the best examples of fraud—understood as “deceit” or “trickery,” Perry Mason fans—are the College Accreditation reports produced nearly a decade ago by Mathur’s appointee Ray Chandos. Those who wish to relive those golden years of bold bowdlerization and blatant bunkum are urged to read Dissent’s IVC Accreditation White-Wash.


MAY ADMINISTRATORS GET SO LUCKY

Yesterday, at IVC (yes, some instructors work on Fridays), I was talking with colleagues after my morning class. We talked about the good things about our jobs—the fact, for instance, that we need only walk down the hall to find knowledgeable persons with whom we can engage in intelligent and informed conversation—about politics, biology, psychology, geology, and whatnot. —The fact that we spend our days explaining and discussing matters about which we are truly interested. —The fact that, in our particular building at least, we can work with decent people, actually achieving things, making things better. We marveled at our good fortune.

We are indeed lucky.

May our administrators someday be so lucky. —CW

Meeting with Congressman Gary Miller, GASBAG

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«Posted for RED EMMA!»

.EIGHT OF US FROM THE CANYONS met with Congressman Gary Miller (R-CA) on Wednesday, April 11, in beauteous Brea, at his district office, which is decorated with vintage Nixon election posters, I shit you not. The 42nd district is Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Wally George country, friends. It is gerrymandered (thanks also to the Democrats) to include only the most reactionary of the right-wing in a dozen cities and three counties!

.Attending this meeting were attractive and handsomely dressed citizens Jan, Steve, Debbie, Ed, Linda, Lorraine, Dion—and Red Emma. Miller shook hands with everybody and insisted on asking us our first names. He then repeated our names to us, as if reminding us of them.

.We all thanked each other for being there and I opened by asking the Congressman to hold a TOWN FORUM or TOWN HALL MEETING on the war.

.Yes, Red likes a challenge.

.I suggested that everybody there at the big shiny wooden table was against the war and eager for it to end and that the Congressman should host a public discussion on that theme. I had already been discouraged from this very proposal by his aide a few weeks earlier. Miller, who offers a kind of Reagan-Chuck Heston-cowboy-jock persona, opined that nobody ever comes to his town forums (he didn’t seem disappointed) and that he did not have time for that since “the Democrats have us on a five day working schedule to do two days’ work.”

.That was supposed to be funny. He grinned, which frightened me. But I persisted, offering what I thought were some winning reasons for both educating and hearing from his constituents, people like us (well, exactly like us, maybe only us) with sponsorship from the League of Women Voters or anybody he liked. I mentioned media sponsors like the OC Register, LA Times and OC Weekly. He responded by stating that he was planning some kind of telephone conference call mass-meeting—if I understood him correctly—which seemed to me to be a whole bunch of people listening to him instead of listening and watching—as we were doing, god help us, the big gasbag.

.He just would not stop about how darn busy he was. I interrupted (interrupting him turned out to be easy, and fun!) to ask if this planned virtual-meeting would focus on the war in particular, and he said—surprise!—“No,” and then told us that immigration was in fact his constituents’ number one issue, not the war.

.He summoned a chubby and fawning aide (Miller is a big man. Weirdly, everybody on his staff is small. Think Willy Wonka and the tiny Oompaloompas) to nod at this assertion. I tried again to suggest that the war should be a priority, regardless, and that we wanted a forum, and that it would be good for Miller to make it an issue because he was our elected representative and George Washington had wooden teeth and Betsy Ross knitted a horse.

.Somebody from our band of citizen lobbyists bravely offered that we could get “a hundred people, easy” to come out for such an event in the canyons alone, which was so frightening an announcement that Miller turned from arguing with me, and asked to hear from others. Steve jumped in, identifying himself as a Vietnam-era veteran, opposed to the war, the lies, the waste.

.Steve was thoughtful and beautiful, and he wears a suit nicely. Miller, who is not only large but physically quite painful to look at (big white teeth, orange hair, skin courtesy of Madame Tussauds) offered some pro-military bromides about sacrifice, identifying a whole cemetery-full of wounded and dead family and friends. He was, pathetically if unshyly, trying to out-military our vet. It was the obvious “Support the Troops” red herring, meant to shame us into—what, I wonder? Changing our minds? Enlisting?

.Thankfully, Ed jumped in, dislodging a few body parts and military dead now strewn across the shiny polished table, with an eloquent economic critique about the failing health of the nation’s markets and trade, offering that the war was harming our status and financial future. Miller disagreed, though I was not sure with what, exactly. It was hard to follow, and since I read only Paul Krugman in the liberal capitalist paper of record, perhaps the dismal science lesson here eluded me.

.Or maybe Miller is just full of shit. At any rate, he disagreed a lot. And talked a lot. Jan had warned us that, during a recent lobby day, she had met with him and couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Miller said he disagreed with Steve too, by the way, and that “win or lose” he was not in favor of a “date certain” end to the war. He said he supported benchmarks.

.I thought of a bench. Thinking of the bench made me want to carve my name or a dirty word on it, and I had to hold my hand back so I wouldn’t start whittling away on the big shiny table. Still, I couldn’t get that phrase “win or lose” out of my head. It sort of wiggled around in there like a small insect or, increasingly, a big insect and then a real big one, maybe Mothra.

.Interrupting, I tried to get Miller to explain what “win” meant, and what “lose” meant. I really did. I should have asked what a benchmark might look like—say, 100 more dead for a month, two hundred dead in six weeks?

.Linda asked him to consider the war profiteering, and he responded, unbelievably, by saying that fraud was built into all programs. He pointed to fraud and abuse surrounding—yes, hold on, wait, here it comes!—Hurricane Katrina relief. This is, of course, ironic for so many reasons, not the least of which is named George Bush.

.Linda, who does not suffer fools, tried to link the war to the opportunism and theft of the war industry, going all cause and effect on him, whence Miller, no slouch, reminded us that he was on the oversight committee (more irony), and that there was abuse and fraud everywhere!

.I think “everywhere” includes his office, but I did not mention that, nor did I mention the part about him being investigated by the FBI for, yes, fraud. (See Most corrupt, Ex-Aids allege abuse of power, Gary Miller can always get what he wants.)


.I did mention Blackwater and KBR, but he looked at me like I had just stepped on his toe or eaten his puppy, which I would have at this point. I kept going back to his job of discussing the war with his constituents, but he again said that immigration and not the war was “our number one issue” and that he was only one Congressman, and that the war was not his committee and that he got along with Democrats, and was a pal of Barney Frank, and that they wrote legislation together, how about that?

.That was pretty darn subtle political insider stuff, I guess, as I think I read somewhere that Barney is gay while Miller is a member of the Sonrise Christian School, whose mission it is "To create an environment where children can experience the love of Jesus as they grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." So see what a cool guy Gary is. Some of my best friends are homosexual illegal immigrants.

.I recalled his foolish views about punishing undocumented Mexicans. I almost interrupted to say that immigration was also not one of his committees. I wanted to make sure of that fact. At home, later, after taking a few recreational painkillers, I looked it up. No, in fact Miller is not on any committees directly dealing with immigration. (See committee memberships.)

.I interrupted again (I was getting good at it), advising him that I understood how committees worked, and didn’t need a civics lesson. He got a little pissy. I went back to the town hall forum idea (the only horses I ride are dead ones) and he said, finally, that he would take it under consideration or something to that effect.

.Soon a cherub or some other flying creature, perhaps one of the monkeys from Oz, arrived to tell the Congressman that our fifteen minutes were over and his next appointment (no doubt the Ghost of Richard Nixon Support Committee) was waiting for him. After shaking and thanking again, I made a bee-line for Steve T, the tallest little aide, with whom I’d met earlier, and asked him when Miller would be in the district again, and when we might think about a town forum. Meanwhile, my fellow citizen lobbyists chatted with Miller, Debbie giving him some moral and political instruction about not killing people. She made direct eye contact (brave woman!) and gave him what she calls the “John Nichols 10-10-10” in an attempt to bring a sense of urgency to ending what she calls “this senseless carnage” (I don’t think she meant the meeting). Here it is:

• Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies
• Every 10 hours an American dies
• Every 10 days we spend 10 billion of our national treasury

.Thus ended our citizen lobbying effort. Methinks we showed a lot of restraint. Nobody once mentioned the bit about Miller being investigated for fraud as the result of not one, but two bogus land deals. (Naturally, he was a “developer” before being elected).

.Of course, if you visit the above link you could choose to embrace further despair (and who doesn’t need more of that?) by noting that this crook is, yes, a member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, where he is the Ranking Minority Member.

.Which is just pretty darned perfect. —RE

Andrew Tonkovich

Gem or turd, it'll be a landmark

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TOOK MY CAMERA TO WORK TODAY. I figured I'd take some new snaps of the Irvine Valley College Performing Arts Center. It's still under construction, but it should be completed in a few months.

You know how people are: they see some big new thing, and so they naturally offer their opinion about its appearance. You don't have to ask 'em for it. They'll give it to you anyway.

At IVC, everybody's got an opinion about this thing. Some like it. Some think it looks like a Best Buy.

Me, I kinda like it.

I admit that it looks kinda weird and edgy. But I like weird and edgy.

I'd have chosen a different color, but, hey, this will do.

Near as I can figure, the thing is gonna be way cool on the inside. My guess: it will be impossible to be unimpressed by its innards, whatever one may think of its lurid hide.

The dang thing better be good somehow, 'cause it's seriously big.

Turd or gem: it'll be a landmark.

Nothing's ever been big at IVC. At IVC, we've only known dinky. This is our first Big Thing.

My money's on this thing turning out well. Naysayers can go pound sand, I say. —CW

P.S.: OK, maybe it does look a little like a Best Buy. But people LIKE Best Buy, don't they?

Hey kids! Let's put on a book burning!

     4/11/07 WEDNESDAY, at approximately 10:45, a college administrator who is responsible for community relations and fundraising approached Rebel Girl in her office. Chunk was there too, ensconced in his new ergonomically correct office chair, swiveling mildly, as if preparing for a stint in the space program. The administrator is a cheerful sort, and bounces with the kind of energy that Rebel Girl envies, but is also frightened by.
     The administrator—let's call him Mickey, shall we?—inquired if she had ever heard of book burning.
     “Sure,” she replied, wondering where he was going with this opening gambit.
     “Have you ever heard of any famous ones?”
     “Why sure,” she said, and she proceeded to talk about the reception John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath received in California by Chamber of Commerce types when it was first published, noting that the anniversary was fast approaching and adding that a book on that very subject was due out soon, written by a local acclaimed journalist. Reb really talks like this, Wiki-entry style. Helpful, right?
     "Well," Mickey said, "I was thinking that we need to better advertise our library and this college as an important resource for the community."
     Reb wasn’t completely following Mickey's train of thought (choo-choo) but she began to hope that what he meant would amount to some kind of scholarly lecture or talk, a series maybe, fully funded with honoraria and a budget and an invitation extended, perhaps, to that local journalist and others. She was, as you can see, already designing the flier and filling the seats. There’d be coffee and cookies, a tower of brownies and bottled water. Rebel Girl would do the introductions.
     “Oh yeah,” she said, “what kind of thing are you thinking about?”
     “Well,” Mickey went on, “the library, it has a lot of books it has to discard, right? Old books, books that are replaced. Sometimes it’s a problem.”
     “What do you mean?” Somehow, she knew at that moment, that her fantasy would remain just that, an unfunded fantasy.
     “We could have a book burning,” Mickey said. “It would get a lot of attention and we could use it to publicize the college.” He flashed her that winning smile of his that must have helped him land his position. Before he came to us, Mickey was in service to a series of local elected grinning Republicans.
     It’s difficult to faithfully describe this scene without further describing Mickey’s typical demeanor, distinguished by a kind of wide-eyed eagerness often found in movies from the 30s, Depression-era black-and-white films meant to warm our hearts. Think Mickey Rooney and young Judy Garland. Shirley Temple. His, like theirs, are the kind of eyes that literally shine with hope: “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”
     Or, in this case: “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a book burning!”


     “No,” Rebel Girl said, “we can’t do that.” Her fantasy had been trumped. There would be no speaker series, no salon on the politics of censorship. That ship had sailed. It had sunk, crashed on the reefs, been torn down like, say, a clock tower infested with termites or a sign on a greenhouse. She found it hard to look at Mickey, at his eager eyes, and instead she examined her new office chair, blue, ergonomically correct, a twin to Chunk's, delivered last week.
     Astronaut Chunk had crash landed. Zero gravity. Think Mercury Seven.
     “Why not?” Mickey wanted to know.
     “You can’t burn books to advertise the college. You can’t. It’s not what we do." (Yes, I really said this.)
     “I think it would be great,” he continued. “We could get lots of publicity, use up the old books."
     Earlier, Chunk had re-entered orbit, and had asked, “And what would be the point of that?” (Chunk has a bit of the Oscar Wilde about him.) He was asking about why we, the college, would burn books. He kept waiting for, as he told me later, Mickey to explain the point of doing that. He hoped that Mickey would pull a rabbit out of a hat, but no. Not a rabbit. Not a duck. Not anything. Actually, there was no hat either.
     Mickey looked at Reb with that smile of his that suggested that he still believed he could sell this modest proposal to her, “And you could be the one who lights the fire!”
     “No,” she said. “Not me.” She eyed the clock and began gathering her materials for class.
     “But you’re such a rebel,” Mickey said, still smiling. He grinned like we were sharing a private joke.
     “Not that kind of rebel,” she replied. “You’ve got me wrong.”
     She began to wonder if the college president had put Mickey up to this, had paid him to come over here and make this proposal, push her into a big practical joke, like the kind where your best pal kneels down behind the dope and then somebody pushes him over. Maybe it went like this: Mickey, Mickey, the president said, I've got an idea! Go over to Rebel Girl's office and tell her we're going to put on a book burning! Maybe she'll fall for it and write about it in the blog! Har, har, har!
     Perhaps there were secret cameras and microphones in the offices as some have suggested. Have you seen the Sharper Image catalog? Maybe even now, at this moment, the college president and his buddies were having a good old laugh at Reb's expense ("Oh, that Rebel Girl, she's such a sap!") in the presidential suite, watching the image of me and Mickey on a screen transmitted by a pen in Mickey's breast pocket that was really, yes, a tiny camera.
     “Look, the Nazis burned books,” Reb told him, “I don’t think we should do that.”
     “We could spin it,” he suggested. “Show that while people used to burn books, now they don’t anymore. It could be a statement about the First Amendment.”
     “While we’re burning books? It doesn’t work. You can’t spin book burning.”
     This went on. And on. Really.
     Chunk tried to clarify a point for Mickey: “A radical might participate in this sort of thing, not because we used to burn books but now we don’t, but because we still burn books.” Chunk teaches logic and you've got to hand it to him, that seemed pretty darn logical.
     Then Reb launched into some examples, including the recent case of the banning of Newbery-award winning children's book, The Higher Power of Lucky, by L.A. librarian and writer Susan Patron. "People banned it," she informed Mickey, "because it had the word "scrotum" in it. On the first page."
     How much longer could this go on?


     Rebel Girl realized later that part of her distress, other than uttering the word "scrotum" aloud to Mickey in her office, had to do with the fact that she was just not prepared to participate in a discussion about organizing a book burning on a Wednesday morning. She had awoken this morning pretty confident that she would not be having this conversation, uttering "scrotum" or staring at Mickey's ballpoint pen.
     Desperation set in. She looked instead at the clock.
     "I have an 11:00 o'clock," she announced and practically pulled Chunk out of his new chair to accompany her. Safety was a modest concern. Sanity was a close second.
     They bade farewell to Mickey who looked as cheerful as always. The show would go on!
     The day was brilliant, that cloudless blue sky that seems to suggest everything is just fine on the little campus in the orange groves, but without the actual orange groves any more, or the fig tree either. The line at the coffee cart was long. The rose bushes were in full bloom if a little sticky with whitefly. Rebel Girl and Chunk marched across the green grass.
     Rebel Girl turned to Chunk. “Did Mickey really just suggest a book burning?”
     Chunk replied, “Indeed he did.” —RG
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     (written mostly by Rebel Girl, with a big assist from Red and the usual support from Chunk.)