Why I’m Losing Faith in the Human Race

The Guardian recently reported on a speech in which a senior Iranian cleric blamed “women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously” for earthquakes.

If that sort of crazy were a feature only of theocratic or third-world countries, we might chuckle and ignore it. Unfortunately, however, the amount of lunacy right here at home suggests a wider problem.

A few examples:

A conspiracy theorist named Larry Klaymon insists that the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas, was an act of Islamic terrorism, and that the government under Obama (“the Other”) is engaged in a wide-ranging cover-up.

Speaking of Obama, in the wake of his re-election, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel explained that that the election result was a “communist takeover” of the United States, and that the IRS will start throwing pastors in jail, invading churches and shooting parishioners.

Then there was the Republican candidate for the Arkansas legislature who wrote a book about the proper biblical approach to child-rearing. And I quote:

“The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:
…

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children.”

Well, yes, I think procedural safeguards before killing one’s children as God decreed are probably appropriate…

Just this month, in the year 2013, the Missouri legislature voted to ban a sustainability program because sustainability is part of the nefarious plot that is Agenda 21!

The Missouri House of Representatives on Monday passed a ban on the United Nations sustainability plan Agenda 21 after a spirited discussion of space aliens and how Walmart could avoid zoning laws to build more stores.

The Republican-controlled House voted 110-40 to ban local governments from adopting the Agenda 21, a broad outline of planning goals and sustainability targets. Agenda 21 was passed by the U.N. in 1992, but has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate and does not contain the force of law in the U.S.

…

Agenda 21 opponents argue the U.N. document would seize private property and force people to live in walkable communities with a potential end to golf and scuba diving.

Your elected representatives at work, protecting your nine-iron….

I assume psychiatrists have theories to explain what seems to be a vastly increased prevalence of paranoia, hysteria and irrationality. Or perhaps there has always been a significant percentage of lunatics in our population, and the Internet has simply brought them to our attention–although I don’t recall a time when we have had so many elected officials who either inhabit an alternate reality or keep going off their meds.

How do you talk to someone who thinks short skirts cause earthquakes? How do you get lawmakers who actually believe that President Obama is a covert Muslim Communist and the Anti-Christ to focus on solving the nation’s problems? How do you get people who think Adam and Eve saddled up dinosaurs to understand climate change? How do you get lawmakers who think women’s bodies can “shut down” rapist sperm to respect women’s right to equality and autonomy?

More important: how do we get the sane folks who have thrown up their hands and withdrawn from the political process to wake up and reclaim the country?

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What Would I Do Without Texas?

As I have noted several times, I owe Texas a debt of gratitude. Whenever I am searching for an example of bad public policy to use in class, the Lone Star State comes through for me.

I thought about Texas’ reliability during a research presentation by one of the teams of students in my graduate Law and Public Affairs class. They had chosen Cap and Trade as the policy proposal they were analyzing, and they began the presentation with a brief history of environmental regulation in the U.S. The student delivering that portion of the presentation noted that federal rules were a response to a couple of the downsides of our federalist system: not only is there often a lack of uniformity, but there are some unfortunate consequences to the fact that states compete with each other to lure businesses and jobs. Before the establishment of the EPA, lack of environmental regulations was one of the “advantages” states offered relocation prospects–“come to our state, and you won’t be bothered by pesky rules keeping you from discharging your toxins in that nearby river.”

Even today, some states allow more pollution than others. According to the student researchers, Indiana is the 7th most polluted state in the country.

Texas, of course, is the worst.

Indeed, Texas Governor Rick Perry has been widely quoted touting his philosophy of economic development, which boils down to:  states wanting to entice business can succeed by reducing or eliminating regulations.

So what if a few fertilizer plants blow up and level some neighborhoods?  So what if polluted air exacerbates asthma and other medical conditions, sickening citizens and driving up medical costs?  So what if the companies most likely to be attracted by an absence of regulation are those looking to evade reasonable standards for safety and environmental compliance?

Diminished health and safety is a small price to pay for job creation bragging rights. Just ask Rick Perry.

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Media Malpractice

Who can Americans trust to report news accurately? Yesterday, I blogged about a recent survey that showed increasing skepticism about Fox News. Barely a half-hour after I posted, my husband mentioned that he’d been listening to a newscast on the radio in which the reporter interviewed lawmakers who are calling for the use of military tribunals for the Boston bombing suspects. According to my husband, the newscaster then reported–as fact–that such tribunals have proved to be more effective than the regular criminal courts. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

He didn’t know it, because that superior effectiveness is not even remotely a “fact.”

The facts are these: after 9-11, the Bush administration initiated prosecutions of 828 people on terrorism charges in civilian courts. Last year, according to a report from the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law, trials were still pending against 235 of them. That leaves 593 resolved cases. Of that number, 523 were convicted, for a conviction rate of 88%.

In addition, the Bush administration pursued 20 cases in military tribunals. So far, there have been exactly three convictions. The highest-profile was the case involving Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. Hamdan was convicted, but he was sentenced  by a military jury to a mere five and half years–and the tribunal judge, a US Navy captain, gave him credit for time served, which was five years. So Hamdan served only six months after conviction.

Furthermore, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld–the case that grew out of this particular trial–the Supreme Court held that the Military Tribunals as constituted at the time violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The propriety of using a Military Tribunal in any given case is, of course, open to debate. What is not debatable is the history of their past performance. It is perfectly legitimate to argue about the pros and cons of using such tribunals; I have my opinion, and others are entitled to theirs. But that debate needs to be grounded in fact, not propaganda.

If we cannot depend upon the media to provide accurate information and to separate opinion from fact– if we have lost what used to be called “the journalism of verification”– we are reduced to exchanging opinions anchored to nothing but our individual biases.

We live in a complicated world. We desperately need a competent and trustworthy media.

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Out-Foxed?

Several recent reports have traced a significant decline in Fox News’ audience. There are a couple of reasons. One is the average age of Fox viewers (65); another is a rather significant erosion in the number of “true believers.”

in a survey of public attitudes toward a variety of media outlets, Public Policy Polling found a marked drop in Fox News’s credibility. A record-high
46 percent of Americans said they put no trust in the network, a nine-point increase over 2010, and 39 percent named Fox News as their least-trusted news source, a percentage that dwarfed all other news channels. (MSNBC, which came in second, was distrusted by only 14 percent.)

As might be expected, Fox News’s credibility barely budged among liberals and moderates (roughly three-quarters of whom still distrust the network) and very conservative viewers (three-quarters of whom still trust it). However, among those who identified themselves as “somewhat conservative,” the level of trust fell by an eye-opening 27 percentage points during the previous twelve months (from a net plus–47 percent  “trust” rating in 2012 to plus–20 percent now). Only a bare majority of center-right conservatives surveyed by PPP say that Fox News is trustworthy.

 The base audience that Fox set out to capture is quite literally dying off. Meanwhile, the strategy the network employed–becoming a “news” source that could be relied upon to pander to the prejudices and beliefs of the most conservative elements of the Republican base–is preventing the network from replacing the True Believers as they die.

More and more, the network is being seen for what it is: a partisan mouthpiece, not a genuine news outlet. It’s about time.

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Battle for the Soul of Higher Education

In this morning’s New York Times, Frank Bruni has a must-read column on the purposes of higher education. He focuses upon a debate currently consuming Texas, but anyone who has listened to the rhetoric coming from the Indiana General Assembly will recognize it as an issue equally salient in Indiana.

As Bruni poses the central question:”Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?”

I would suggest an even more basic question: are we willing to value education?  Do our lawmakers even recognize that education is not the same thing as job training? Do they see any value in the liberal arts, or in research that adds to the sum of human understanding and knowledge? Evidently not.

Bruni quotes the new Governor of Virginia on the subject: “Pat McCrory, the new governor of North Carolina, recently advocated legislation to distribute funds to the state’s colleges based not on their enrollments — or, as he said on a radio show, on “butts in seats” — but instead on “how many of those butts can get jobs. If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

The current emphasis on what we used to call “vocational education” not only minimizes the value of education itself, it ignores the reality of today’s job market. Most college graduates will have several careers–not just jobs, but careers–and a significant number of those have yet to be invented. Students who emerge with “training” rather than an education that prepares them to think, to apply critical analytic skills to a rapidly changing economy and world, will soon need re-training.

Students who have been taught to think only instrumentally–who value only instruction that is immediately applicable economically, who are satisfied with the “how” and never ask “why”–are already at a considerable disadvantage. We have plenty of those students now, and I often want to invert the dismissive and ignorant statement made by Virginia’s Governor, and tell them: If you just want to learn how to manufacture widgets or push paper, fine.

Go to a trade school.

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