Mediation, meditation. Whatever

Gotta love the OC Register. I opened the Reg website this morning and read the headline:

UCI wants $8 million for place to meditate

To meditate? Well, OK. So I clicked on the link, and that took me to an article entitled,

UCI wants $8 million for place to mediate

To mediate? Well, that’s very different, isn’t it? And mediation does seem to be a need over there. Meditation? Not so much.

Then I read the story. It was back to “meditate,” I guess. (Or is it “mediate”?):

UC Irvine is proposing an “unmatched” plan to help students of different religious, racial, cultural and political backgrounds to interact more peacefully — construction of an $8 million Center for Awareness, Reflection and Meditation.

The privately and publicly funded center, says a university document, is “among the highest priorities” of (UCI) Chancellor Michael V. Drake, M.D.

“The mission of the center will be to foster contemplation, self-reflection, and quiet thought and, in the process, promote awareness of and conscientious action by discovering common ground and communicating in an open and respectful manner while practicing good citizenship on campus.”
. . .
The planning document says the proposed center would “build on the strong foundation laid and the lessons learned through such programs as the Olive Tree Initiative. Founded in 2007, the Olive Tree Initiative was established by UC Irvine students working closely with Chancellor Drake and Vice Chancellor (Manuel) Gomez to discuss constructively and respectfully conditions and issues in Israel and Palestine.”….

The comments are all that we’ve come to expect from Reg readers. For instance, “chris zierer” says:

You just can’t make stuff like this up! Only with a liberal uh I mean progressive world view could you find a more asinine way to waste private and more importantly public resources!!!!!

“Cheryl” says:

Unbelievable. These people need a job in the “real” world. They have obviously been lost in academia.

Some readers referred to the planned “meditation” center. Others referred to the planned “mediation” center.

I don’t think they know the difference.

And I’m wondering about this Drake fella too.

Free advertising!

OK, we admit it. This one’s our fault.

Yesterday, when she learned that Gustavo “Ask a Mexican” Arellano was among the three names forwarded to Irvine Valley College President Glenn Roquemore for selection as the 2010 commencement speaker—Rebel Girl nominates the fellow every year, and this is the first year in which he made the finals—she quickly emailed him to tell ‘im the good news.

Seconds earlier, the Reb had been mocking—in a lighthearted way—the curious fact that the recently-distributed flier for IVC’s celebration of Black History Month sported images of various Africans and African-Americans, like — Mahatma Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi?

The Mockery of Gaffery (—of gaffery that seems to reveal racial insensitivity or cluelessness) is one of the Reb’s favorite things. Sometimes, she choreographs mock-a-thons as though they were necessary, like praying to Mecca, or, in Orange County, invoking the memory of St. Ronald.

In truth, however, this goof was pretty dang funny. Gandhi a black man? Gandhi?! So I joined in the fun. Others did too. T’wern’t just me. (And we weren't mocking any people—we had no idea who created this thing; we focused on the flier.)

I suppose that the flier was sent out by Diane Oaks (Director of Public Info & Marketing). She and her crew, I know, are good, professional and hard-working people, and so I don’t want to point fingers and cause ‘em any grief. It would take a lot to bring us to do that—a truly egregious flub—and this isn’t that at all.

A few minutes later, while the Reb was composing an email to Gustavo for a second time, we received a spam email from Roquemore that announced that one of the other two nominees had been selected. The State Chancellor, I think. Dang!

“I bet he’s a Republican,” I said.

Earlier, the Reb had hatched a plan: first, to expect the big shot State Chancellor* to be selected right out of the gate. That's a lead pipe cinch. But surely he’d turn down this little speaking gig. Then Roquemore would move down to choice #2, an acquaintance of the Reb's. (We knew that Roquemore would never willingly choose Gustavo, who is so manifestly unRepublican, what with his fixation on suppressed and forgotten unfluffy facts.)

The Reb’s plan: to get #2 on the horn before Roquemore did and tell 'em, “Hey, could you wait until next year? When the Prez calls, say you can't do it!”

“Sure, girlfriend!”

That would leave Gustavo as the unavoidable choice. Bingo!

Nice, eh?

“We can ask ‘im to be especially obnoxious!” I said.

Just then, Francisco walked by. “You won’t have to!” he joked. Yup, Gustavo is a pretty edgy guy, by Republican standards. I mean, he knows local history and he's in the habit of tellin' it like it was.

That's seriously unRepublican, dude.

“Maybe he could talk about the Orange Diocese and their pedophile priests!” offered the Reb, laughing.

“Tom Fuentes wouldn't even show up, would he?”

“No f*cking way!”

Har har har!

—It was all in good fun. Really it was. Just having a few yucks.

So the Reb was in the middle of her second email to Gustavo, and we were still joking around. I said: “Gosh, didn’t you just write him about being a finalist? And ten minutes later, you’re gonna lower the boom on ‘im?”

Well, if anybody can take a joke, it’s Gustavo. Rebel Girl said something. I got distracted by a bug or a carpet stain or mold or something.

At some point, not really thinking, I said, “Tell ‘im about that goofy flier!”

We both laughed. Har har har.

Now, who’d o’ thunk that the darned guy would follow up on this dinky “Afro-Gandhi” anecdote?

—Well, um, he's done just that.

Irvine Valley College Celebrates Black History Month with Gandhi, Graffiti Wall, Double Obamas!

Oh, the racialist merriment of the South Orange County Community College District never end[s]! We've previously written about Saddleback College's gaucho-masquerading-as-bandito, and now Irvine Valley College has gotten into the simplistic-approach-to-race game so endemic in Orange County. IVC spokesperson Diane Oaks sent out a campus-wide email yesterday advertising the juco's Feb. 24 Black History Month celebration. Attached was a flyer (above) that is...interesting.

For starters: exactly how is Mahatma Gandhi black?

Yes, Gandhi inspired the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, but there are hundreds of other African-Americans that most folks would put on a poster of notables before the martyr for a Black History Month poster. Whoever made this flyer didn't even have to look far for another face.
. . .
What's worst about these efforts, though, is the urging of students to leave their thoughts about Black History Month on a "graffiti wall." You can make the argument such a move stereotypes blacks as criminals, but my bigger concern is that dumbass coeds will leave nasty remarks about African-American students on it—such harassment has happened at Saddleback College in the not-so-distant past, with less of an invitation.

But the one part of the flyer that's not foolish? Soul food for the IVC celebration. Drudge and his pals might've tried to make a big scandal of NBC serving such grub for their Black History Month celebration, but come on: you're not going to eat pizza for St. Patrick's Day, or kielbasa on Cinco de Mayo. Now, let's see if IVC can sneak in Jackie Robinson into the flyer...

OK, Diane, et al. Gustavo isn’t really being mean here. He gets lots meaner. Really. This is practically nothing. It's practically less than nothing, almost.

And did you notice he praised the "soul food" idea? And you guys used such great fonts! The whole thing really pops!

(I don't think any of us found the "graffiti wall" idea troubling at all. And why not use two images of Obama? These darned kids won't recognize anybody else anyway. Maybe next time add Will Smith and Kobe Bryant. Yeah.)

OK?

And, yes, it’s all my fault. I’ll take the hit. Loose lips sink ships.

But look on the bright side!

Free advertising!

*I looked him up. State Chancellor Jack Scott is actually a Democrat!

We haven’t got a prayer

From the latest issue of Bob Park’s “What’s New”:

Prayer: California Supreme Court rejects superstition:

Bruce Flamm, obstratician and skeptic, fought a millionaire fertility/prayer clinic operator through the California court system and won. The case involved the notorious "Columbia prayer study," in which it
was claimed that prayer increased the success rate of fertility treatments.

Flamm demanded the study be withdrawn. Qwang Cha, the millionaire clinic operator, lost at every level but kept appealing the judgment in the belief that Flamm must inevitably fold.

Bruce Flamm doesn’t fold.

Last week the California Supreme Court refused to consider the Appeals Court decision against Cha.

The boat is sinking faster than we are bailing:

A Special Section of Science magazine this week is devoted to the problem of feeding "an expected population of 9 billion in 2050."

Expected by whom? In the last 40 years, the population [of the planet] has doubled. If it doubles again in then ext 40 the population would be closer to 14 billion. In the entire issue of Science, I did not see a single mention of population control.

In 1798, the Rev. Robert Thomas Malthus, British scholar and clergyman, observed that animals typically produce far more offspring than are required for replacement. This helps to ensure survival of the species, as Darwin noted 50 years later citing Malthus. To avoid excessive population, Malthus
urged "restraint," but the reproductive instinct is far more powerful than Malthusian logic.

I cannot do better than to once again quote Norman Borlaug’s acceptance speech on the occasion of winning the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for the Green Revolution. It bears repeating:

"We are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. Man has made amazing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers...there can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."

This, it is clear from the Special Section, has not yet happened.

It's good to smile

• Dear Orly Taitz: what the f*ck? (YouTube) ... “You claim a mystifying combination of professions: lawyer, dentist, real estate agent…”....

• A miscellany of new words and phrases (New York Times) ... “i am a vegetarian with a most discriminating palate, i am a finnickytarian"....

• Community College Offers Students a Guarantee: a Job or Your Money Back (Chronicle of HE) ... The offer applies to only four programs: pharmacy technician, customer-service call-center workers, certified quality inspectors, and home-technology-integration technicians....
• Bolivia to launch satellite into space (Guardian) ... The impoverished South American country, famed more for llamas and Andean peaks than technology, has created a space agency to build and launch a satellite with Chinese help....
• Stunning arial 9-11 photos (Daily News) ... Good Lord, they're for sale!

Another great band, early 80s:


Another band from roughly the same era--perhaps 4 years earlier: Gang of Four. My favorite song of theirs is “I found that essence rare.”

I couldn’t find a decent YouTube video of that song, but you can listen to it here:

Aim for the body rare, you'll see it on TV
The worst thing in 1954 was the Bikini
See the girl on the TV dressed in a Bikini
She doesn't think so but she's dressed for the H-Bomb
For the H-Bomb!

I found that essence rare, it's what I looked for
I knew I'd get what I asked for....

• The Smiths (1982-1987)
• The Violent Femmes (1982-1986)
• The Gang of Four (1977-1982)

Howard Zinn? No, not an Astronaut

Professor No-It-All Gets Attitudinous! Answering Questions That You Never Actually Asked, Yet Ever So Helpfully!

Today’s lecture: I See Dead People. I See Dumb People (And Hear Them, Too)

            Gotta love those otherwise intuitively skeptical, pro-liberation listeners to KPFK (90.7 FM), the non-corporate alternative Pacifica network community radio station which features the BiblioFella on his modest weekly books show. The station is just now fundraising to stay on the air as the singular independent, reality-based community arts and public affairs media outlet in Southern California. Most KPFK supporters seem to at least try, heroically, to stay on that reality-based track, even as status quotidians, mystics, hucksters, New Agers and conspiracy theory types hoe their own row on the rest of the dial and NPR struggles to become a “mainstream” news source, abandoning its original premise of 1970s citizen-owned corrective to the media monopoly. 

              KPFK plays hours and hours of lectures and talks by — and interviews of — Noam Chomsky, Martin King, Harold Myerson, Arundhati Roy, David Corn, Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich, all practitioners of critical thinking — as against so much of the nonsense offered by the commercial news machine. 

             Still, as if fated with flying monkeys stuck on their backs, even some KPFK listeners cannot shake the ideological weight of the “spiritual” and the religious, especially in language and metaphor. The credulous — religious believers, “truthers,” miracle health cure disciples, positive thinkers — have little room in their brains or conversation for more than one metaphor, more than one book, their Book or construction or theory.  This figurative language-based ideology — often expressed in the assumption of a supernatural — shapes their vernacular and so, their thinking. Unthinking. All can be explained, if only we ignore, well, everything else and embrace some phrase, some rhetorical paradigm, usually exactly the opposite of what we mean. 

            Time, then, for some intellectual self-defense.  (Don't say I never gave you anything!) The tyranny of monotheism and other exclusivist thinking is the easiest controlling metaphor to hear, if only we will listen for it and talk back, interrupt — politely of course. But nobody talks back. Here’s your chance. Next time a religionist or spiritualist tells you he or she admires representative democracy, embracing it while they live here on Earth (about 78 years, average), ask them how we can believe them. Ask them, politely, how we can trust their commitment to representative democracy since they aspire to dwell after death in a place called Eternity (a lot longer!) not as voters or activists in a democracy but as subjects in a monarchy, with a lord and king telling them what to do. Hard to reconcile, no? 

            Yes, actually. Very hard. Meanwhile, back at KPFK, on Monday afternoon a caller to “Reality Check with Harrison,” a funny news and commentary show, reported that she’d learned Professor Howard Zinn (1922-2010) had died. But, no, she didn’t actually say that. Instead, she offered that he’d “left the planet.” Left the planet? In fact, he’d had a heart attack. It happens, to all of us, and I mourn his death.  

            Professor No-it-allovich’s favorite anecdotal aside: At a memorial service for his friend the poet Allen Ginsberg, the late Kurt Vonnegut began his remarks with this wonderfully droll and humane caution to his audience: “Please, please, please. Nobody else die!” Funny. (And, no Vonnegut is not so much late himself now as he is dead.  See actual photo, above!)

             So: Howard Zinn did not leave the planet. He is not visiting faraway galaxies, did not go to heaven, and will not come back as an animal or a spirit or a king. He lived, he struggled, and he was a really smart, empathetic and brave person. And then his body stopped living. I miss him.  

            Yuri, Alan, Valentina, John, Neil and Buzz “left the planet,” via the Vostok and Mercury and Apollo programs, but they came back. They were cosmonauts and astronauts. Howard Zinn? He was a radical historian. He was not an astronaut, and neither are you, friend. Next week:  Herbal Tea Partiers.        

James B. Utt remembered

Earlier today, a reader offered these observations and memories of Congressman James B. Utt, the man for whom the Saddleback College LIBRARY was named:

I am not aware that Congressman Utt was a bigot.* Most who knew him personally thought he was a soft-spoken, mild-mannered country gentleman. He was not the typical politician who talked out of both sides of his mouth. One always knew where she/he stood with Utt – what you saw is what you got. He was respected by all who came in contact with him, agree with him or not.

True, he, like many other conservatives, felt that membership in the U.N. did not serve the best interests of the U.S.

In February 1970, just a couple of weeks before his death on March 1, Utt attended the three-year anniversary celebration of the founding of the Saddleback [Community College District]. On a long walk around the campus, he and Vogel discussed the future of the district. It was at that time Vogel told Utt that the trustees had decided to name the first permanent structure – the library – in his honor. Upon hearing this he was quite humble and expressed his gratitude. He was, obviously, very pleased.

Upon hearing of his death, the trustees were happy that he had become aware of the honor that they were going to bestow upon him.

Be kind, please. Leave it be. He died 40 years ago, ten days short of his 71st birthday.

*According to the OC Almanac, in 1963, “U.S. Congressman James B. Utt [made] national news by suggesting that ‘a large contingent of barefooted Africans’ might be training in Georgia as part of a United Nations military exercise to take over the U.S.” See also here.

Wagner: red, red meat

Today, Matt Cunningham of Red County/OC Blog (Conservative Leader Bucher Endorses Don Wagner) passed along the latest press release from Don Wagner’s Assembly campaign (below).

The press release doesn't offer news, really, since Bucher has long supported Wagner. But faculty and classified will find some of Don’s rhetoric pretty interesting:

Mark Bucher Endorses Conservative Wagner

Mark Bucher, one of California’s leading conservative activists, has announced his support of Don Wagner, Republican candidate for the 70th Assembly District and president of the South Orange County Community College Board of Trustees.

"On the Community College Board, Conservative Don Wagner has been a consistent vote for fiscal accountability and educational excellence. He's never been afraid to go toe-to-toe with the public employee unions if those unions weren't putting students and education first."

Bucher has been a vocal critic of the power and influence of labor unions in California, which led him to found the Education Alliance, a group dedicated to assisting school board candidates who are independent of education unions. He has been instrumental in landmark ballot initiatives like Proposition 226, which would have required unions to receive permission to use their members’ dues for political purposes; Propositions 174 and 38 promoting school choice; and Proposition 22, the Defense of Marriage Initiative.

“No one has done more for education reform than Mark Bucher and I am grateful to him for dedicating himself to fighting the unions’ corrosive impact on education in California,” said Wagner. “We have worked together at the South Orange County Community Colleges to minimize the influence of the unions and I plan to continue that fight as a member of the State Assembly. The public employee unions are destroying our state and we need to rein them in.”….

Fine Young Cannibals (1984-1988)
UB40 (1978- )