Letters to the Editor
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bamage? Did you go to Cornel University to learn to change bandages?
You and my son went there. He now knows how to make apple pie. He went to Art School before Cornel, and still talks about the classroom talks and more importantly, the Gladness that he never fell for the preppy-meet-Somebody Famous clique at Cornel University.
Yea. Cornell isn't like the Founders intended.
Grant money from daddy buys a kitchen named after ya's...
My son's dorm was the environmental Sleep-Hall... ...
Just the other day, my son was wondering.... If a art painting he did about biotech vs. old time farm Planting methods was still on the hall wall?
The colorful painting covered about 30-feet od hall dorm space from floor to ceiling. I hope it is still there. P.S. If a Cornell student reads here? Maybe see if the M.J. wall painting is still there? Off topic. Just curious. Can't get angry at me for wondering.... Wendell Berry is quite critical, bamage. of changes at Cornell. bamage Do You need any bandages or want to buy some Moxifloxacin HCL 400MG? What is the going street price per them big-bad anti-Rot Tabs?
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Academia
creates a space for possible free thinking: whether or not that possibility is realized is found on a case by case basis. What is valuable in the structure of tenure and academic freedom is that is does give a real space that can be taken advantage of. That is perhaps why the right wing has been such a fierce critic of tenure and the traditional university structure. The ongoing battle now is to prevent what is called the "corporate model" of the university. That many or maybe even most do not take advantage of the still free space (indeed, how many take advantage of much anyway?) does not decrease my delighted appreciation for being able to teach courses which raises questions such as Chomsky raises, and to do so in detail and with a thoroughness not possible elsewhere.
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Aside @ GG
I wouldn't worry about the vid. On the Charlie Rose site, I listened to the entire interview w/ the Iraqis. Everything I saw there I'd seen previously via your embed.
Aych, I agree about Chomsky being more correct than incorrect. I suppose an argument might be made that I've yet to have the scales fall from my eyes so that I can "view the frame". I'd argue the contrary, however.
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Holly McL
Perhaps the Baby Boomers have been unusually successful at turning their kids into tools.
It takes a sustained effort on the part of the teacher and a fairly unusual and receptive mind on the part of the student for someone not to turn out as a "tool".
My grown daughter is quite intelligent and writes well, I made a sustained effort to help her become a truly independent thinker.
These days she hates to hear anything from me beyond comments on the weather or my grandkids, I question the comforting assumptions she has absorbed from the culture at large.
To question the ground assumptions of one's culture is a very uncomfortable place to be both intellectually and socially. It takes someone who is decidedly non conformist in the first place to successfully throw off the blinders of cultural indoctrination.
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bamage
I guess what I mean is I regularly teach people about the frame: I point to it around us in the institution we are in and in our culture. And I do this slowly and in depth. The institution makes a space for me to do that. As long as it allows that, there is something good and alive in it, I think.
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GC
My time in Ithaca apparently overlapped that of Keith Olbermann's AND Ann Coulter's. I haven't been back since a reunion in 2002.
Dunno what's going on there now, so I can't argue w/ Berry, but man, CU was a helluva place. I mean that in a good way.
My psyche could maybe use a few bandages, though, after a few self-inflicted wounds it took while there. 8')
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There are good things
in the world too! Plato pointed out basically that is bad news and good news. The bad news is that "evils are many and good things are few". The good news is that there are a few good things. Goodness is real, though apparently heavily outnumbered. But there it still is.
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The symbolism
After watching for a second time, I just can't get over the symbolism I totally missed the first time through. It appears that Rose has quite a nasty black eye and a bandage above it. Doesn't that just completely sum up how what we as Americans, and especially Rose as a journalist, deserve before we can approach Iraqis to ask them about what we have done?
(Apologies if someone already commented on this, as I have to do a drive-by comment on my way out of town.)
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correction
Plato pointed out basically that THERE is bad news and good news, etc.
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"you can't tell me our intentions aren't honorable"
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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dcutler and Glenn
My memory -- faulty, I'm sure -- is somewhat like yours dcutler regarding the Jennings interviews. He wasn't at all sure what he had encountered, but was clearly unprepared to hear what he did.
But the problem isn't and wasn't necessarily that the Iraqis Jennings was interviewing were spewing propaganda. In fact, a lot of the propaganda coming out of the Iraqi ministries during the invasion was spot on truth. That, I submit, was the problem. We couldn't have that, we still can't. As Jack Nicholson so presciently informed Tom Cruise in that famous court-martial scene: You can't handle the truth!
And so it has been.
But maybe there are some cracks in the ever-growing wall of lies. You can't get much more "establishment media" than Charlie Rose. Yet he had on these two Iraqis; he must have known what they were going to say, he'd had one on before and he -- or his producers -- had surely read the works of the other one. He had to know they were not kindly disposed to the invasion and occupation of their country.
And he had them on his deeply "establishment" show, and they were allowed to mouth off extensively, and though he sparred with them, and though he tried to get them to go along with his premise (the premise all Serious People have, that Our Job is to find a way to Success), they wouldn't do it. One of them went so far as to say the invasion and occupation were crimes. And the only way to fix it is to deal with those crimes (and by extension, the criminals who did it.)
Well. That point of view (which, btw, has been echoed in the anti-war community since well before the invasion) is now Out There. It's now a legitimated perspective, at least among expatriate Iraqis.
It can now be discussed. In the mainstream. Thanks to Charlie Rose.