New Year's Eve

There is a stone in my

heart.

You're listening to KWMR,

90.5 Point Ray Station

and 89.9 Bolinas.

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the

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And now we are joined by the Ersatz Mayor

of Marshall, Paul Elmore, for

an update on weather and traffic. Uh,

good morning, Paul.

Good morning. I prefer retired to Ersatz.

I was just trying to keep it buried.

[laughs] Uh, the

weather. Today,

mainly sunny with a high near

46. A northwest wind around six miles per

hour.

Tonight is partly cloudy with a

temperature rising to about

43 by 2:00 AM.

Uh,

west,

northwest wind around five miles an hour.

New Year's Day, sunny with a high near 48.

East north-- uh,

east wind six to 13 miles per

hour.

Tuesday night, clear

and with a low around 40.

East northwest wind nine to 14 miles per

hour.

Wednesday

with a high near 49,

but an east wind around 16 miles per hour

with gusts as high as 20. That's

when you feel the cold.

Wednesday night,

partly cloudy with a low around 43.

Now, these readings are predicted for, um,

um...

by the, uh, National Weather Service

for an area around, uh,

Point Reyes Station.

But the further you get away from the bay,

the colder it is.

Uh,

on my drive down from Marshall to Point

Reyes,

uh, this morning,

all the grasses along the side of the road

were,

um,

were frosted. So the,

the chance for black ice

somewhere, uh, particularly as I say,

as you get away from the

bay,

places like along Walker Creek, uh,

as you go up

towards Tomales, which

is always in perennial shadow,

uh, that's very apt to be a little slick.

So take it easy.

Um,

now, in terms of

traffic?

Yeah, please.

Okay, traffic.

Um,

there were only five cars that I passed,

uh,

on my 13-mile drive from Marshall to Point

Reyes

Station.

Uh,

so traffic is very light out here.

Actually, three of

those were in Point Reyes itself.

Uh,

there--

For those of us who have to go

over the hill, shall we say,

uh, traffic still is light. There was one

blockage on the Bay Bridge early this

morning,

um,

closing two lanes, but it was cleared up.

There was no stoppages on any of the

bridges.

Uh, there was, however,

to illustrate my point about,

uh, black ice, there

was a crash on San Pablo Dam

Road due to black ice. Um,

now,

the, uh,

highway patrol will be out in force

tonight, so be very careful.

Uh, as a matter of fact, my advice

is to shelter in place.

And remember, there is a tomorrow,

in spite of the fiscal cliff.

It's already January 1st in

Australia.

How about that? Thank you, Paul. And, uh,

your aphorism for the day.

Oh, if I can find it.

"All living souls welcome whatever

they're, they are ready to

cope with. All else they ignore

are pronounced to be

monstrous and wrong or deny to be

possible."

That's by George Santayana,

and I acquired this,

to give the provenance,

from, uh, Sunbeams, uh,

a section in The Sun

magazine, December 2012.

Thank you very much, Paul. Uh, and, uh,

this is

the local.org radio blog. Today,

we've got a number of

guests. Uh, of course, Loretta Farley

is gonna come in and give us her update on

the park. We also have, uh,

Paul Elmore for as long as he'll, uh,

stay with us. And, uh,

a little later in the hour,

um, Inverness, uh, resident, uh,

Elizabeth Barnett is

going to join us along with Julia Peters

from Marshall to discuss schooling.

Uh, we also have, uh, Johan Coetzee, uh,

who is, uh,

joining us from, uh, South Africa,

though he's here in studio today.

And he's gonna discuss, uh, the, uh,

history and, and conditions, uh,

and perceptions of, uh,

of, uh, Africa,

in particular South Africa, uh,

along with Paul Fenn,

who is going to, uh, provide, uh,

a similar kind of, uh,

discussion and comparison to the

experience, uh, of Americans

and, uh, in American history. Uh, and, uh,

a little later in

the show, if we get to it,

maybe we'll have predictions.

We'll have New Year's predictions,

and we'll have a call-in for that.

Uh,

we have two dedicated listeners in

Marshall

Paul and Donnachen, we'll see

if we can get them, uh,

Paul Reffel rather and

Donnachen, we'll see

if we can get them to the phones.

Um,

and any other listener who might be out

there, uh, who has a New Year

prediction, uh, that might be great.

Okay, so we're gonna have a song,

and we'll be back, uh, in just a minute,

uh, for the beginning of Local.org Radio

Blog.

My terrible ways, they got

me in jail. Where some did

succeed,

I always did fail. But I thought

I was fine to wait for

the day,

when I'd paid for my terrible

ways.

My terrible ways, they

came to an end,

when a mighty deluge freed the

criminal men.

But I stayed in Mississippi,

and three souls I saved.

And so ended my terrible

ways.

Terrible ways,

terrible ways. Sooner

or later,

a criminal pays.

And I'll never have

enough, enough

to pay this off.

Terrible

ways, terrible

ways. Sooner or

later, a criminal pays.

And I'll never have

enough, enough

to pay this off.

My terrible

ways, the governor

forgave. On account of three

souls and account of the wave,

that took my wife and baby and swept

them away.

All 'cause of my terrible

ways.

Terrible ways,

terrible ways. Sooner

or later,

I know I'm gonna pay.

And I'll never have enough,

enough

to pay this off.

You're listening to KWMR.

This is the Local.org Radio Blog.

I'm joined here by Paul Fenn.

Good morning.

And, uh, also here with us is, uh,

Paul Elmore.

Good morning.

And Johann Coetzer.

[laughs] And,

uh, uh, w-

so we're looking at the new year here.

It is, uh, December 31st,

and, uh, we're looking for predictions.

Paul Elmore, do you have any predictions?

None whatsoever.

[laughs] A- a- and-

The world ended, uh, last week.

That is--

[laughs] So it takes the pressure off,

doesn't it?

And the fiscal cliff is occurring tonight.

Can you ex-

explain the fiscal cliff to me at all,

Paul?

Because I blessedly, uh, you know-

...

do not observe the evening news very

often, and I-

Well,

it's an apocalyptic rendering of our

financial

system. Uh,

it's probably more like a downward

slope, uh, where the Republicans

are testing the

Keynesian, uh, hypothesis.

But, uh, so wanting to cut

costs and reduce government input into the

economy,

uh,

but it will take a while to go,

and it can be checked with

legislation with the,

the new Congress as it comes in

January 4th.

Do you have any understanding of the

consequences?

Uh, you know,

I was talking about this earlier, and I,

I tend to be so cynical

about these things. I, I wonder what are,

what are the real consequences of this?

Because it seems like another media

extravaganza of-

Well, as, uh, it, it, it bespeaks our,

our love

of apocalypses, as I said. Uh, the, the

consequences are, uh, contained, uh,

in the Keynesian prediction that if, uh,

you--

if when the economy

is not functioning well,

that you need government money to

supplement it,

uh, to keep the economy going.

Uh,

the problem with the Keynes is

that the time to balance

the budget is when the economy

is going well, and that never

seems to happen.

You know, it's interesting you say

that 'cause I can remember looking at just

statistics about municipalities here in,

um- In California.

And every year of the boom year, the

property values would increase,

so the tax revenues would increase,

but the

borrowing against those increases would be

two, three, four, fivefold.

So, you know,

as you say, there is no correction

that happens in the boom years.

No.

That's interesting.

Well,

there you go. And, you know,

so we're going to have a couple of

different things on

the show. Paul, do you want to

Yeah, the sort of theme of the hour,

I guess, is education

and colonization.

We've got

Johan here who's from South Africa,

and we've been discussing

post-colonial

situation in Africa

and in South Africa in particular, but

also in relation to

the

American colonies and the

comparative situations of

the societies today

essentially dealing with the downwind

consequences of

colonial societies

and just how they differ because they

are so different.

You know, we have here

in Marin County essentially a

depopulated zone where the native peoples

are simply absent.

There's a couple people

that live here that have some Miwok

blood in them, but that's about it.

And you've got to go north to find any

sign of the

tribe

versus, you know,

in South Africa where you've got

essentially

the omnipresence of the native

peoples.

And so a very different dynamic in terms

of

how the European populations relate to the

native population.

So that's sort of one side of the show is

discussing that.

And then the other side we have

a discussion of

education in America,

in particular the subject of

homeschooling.

And we'll have Elizabeth Barnett coming in

on the show

and we'll discuss

as well as with Julia Peters who will come

in to talk about

homeschooling and some of the challenges

that

people face in trying to educate their

children here independently

of the school system.

So in about five minutes we're going to

have Loretta Farley as well to give us

our update on the park. That's at 820.

The one thing that interests me is

when you were at the new school with

Judith

Butler, so we can, I don't know

if you had any interaction with

her,

but just it seems to me there's something

problematic about the

way we understand our own colonial history

in the sense that

the what I'll call a post-colonial

perspective seems to go back

to

and in very tiny ways look to expose the

inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the

settling people or the colonizing people

and

a relationship with the people that

were present

there when they arrived.

But it doesn't seem to actually give

you when you put all of these criticisms

together much

more than a

very moralistic and sort of

fragmented view of what

was actually happening.

I feel like we have a very incomplete,

we have a mythology about ourselves

and our colonial past

or the story of the settling of America by

Europeans, but the response to that

mythology, it's just these tiny isolated

criticisms that don't really seem to be

able to form into any kind of

overarching critique.

Is this a sort of broader problem of

postmodern criticism or is that,

I'm trying to,

it doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

I'll take one example.

There's a book I read in college,

Changes in the Land,

and it talks about the ways in

which the European settlers

in New England were unable to see the ways

in which

the Native Americans improved the land

or controlled the land to

specifically benefit them. They

were unable to perceive essentially their

agriculture or their game management

and things like that.

And it was part of this larger sort of

attitude of the colonial people that

the Natives didn't take care of the land

or didn't use it and so they had no right

to it.

Well, it's an interesting criticism

and it's an interesting book,

but it doesn't

seem to actually

lead anywhere, if

that makes any sense in a way for me.

It seems too narrowly focused

or it isn't a part of a larger sort of

understanding of history. I don't know

if that occurs to you as well, but

it

Well,

certainly I think it's very difficult for,

in the absence

of the Native,

to form a whole concept of the place.

That essentially we're living in a kind of

vacuum left by that slaughter. And so the

children and grandchildren

of the slaughterers grow naive to their

situation, right?

They're not aware of that violence

or they become disconnected from

that violence and then develop

an idealized notion of

this paradise, right, in which we live

and then try to recreate archetypes

that have very little to do

with this place.

And it's about the,

I think this does play into education in

some

sense, the way that we have tried to

remove aggression

from

education or interaction with children

or our understanding of our

identity.

And by somehow deleting aggression from

our

behavior in this very sort of sentimental

world that wealthy Americans live in,

that somehow we've repaired

or improved some part of our

violent past.

We've dealt with it in some way.

To jettison it.

Yeah, and it seems tremendously naive,

of course,

because we're only free from that

violence in our little imperial bubble.

Yeah, no, I think that's,

that's absolutely right,

and we wanna get into, uh, you

know, a broad discussion of, of,

of education in

schools, uh,

as, you know, as, uh,

the kind of social programming,

uh, that for, for,

for so many years has been viewed as, as

necessary, a necessary complement to,

uh, to, to raising a child is, is,

you know, to socialize them, and this

idea that children, uh,

require socialization.

That, that without, uh,

placing them in an institutional

environment,

uh,

that there'll be something missing in

their character.

What you'll often hear from,

'cause I homeschool my children, uh,

from my

friends is, "Well, it's all great.

You know,

they seem to be getting a wonderful

education, but what's gonna happen

when they get out into the real world?"

The question is,

what do they mean by the real world,

right?

That's the, the-

The world of their disappointments

... but also the world of,

of exploitation, the world of,

of, of hierarchy and subordination-

Yeah

... uh, you know, of, of, um,

essentially of,

of, uh, lining up and,

and behaving as you're supposed to behave,

um, wi- within the economy

is what they really mean.

A conditioning to the nine-to-five job,

conditioning to perform and

compete,

um,

[clears throat] as opposed to a view of

life

which, which,

uh, which places the individual,

uh, in front essentially of,

of any such programming

and would regard the purpose of

education,

um, more broadly, uh, as, as the

enlightenment of the individual, as,

as the opportunity to, to,

uh, to become self-governing

and to become independent.

These virtues are,

are sorely lacking in our educational

institutions, which

all-

Absolutely.

And so, y- uh, we'd like to get into,

to that as well, and,

uh, I think Elizabeth Barnett will be,

be in here, uh,

fairly shortly, and we'll... So we'll...

As well as Julia Peters, and-

Wonderful

... and for now, maybe we'll, uh,

have another tune to warm us up for this,

uh,

this enticing, uh, discussion.

And, uh, when we come back,

I think Loretta Farley will be here on the

park, so,

uh, we'll be right back. This

is local.org Radio Blog,

Paul Fenn, uh, myself, Charles Schulz,

and we're here with, uh, Johann

Koetzer and, and Paul Amor.

I saw her standing there.

Our last parking lot, 'cause we didn't

have a prayer.

Liquid roses trying to

confess. Don't cry that way. Don't

cry that way. Don't cry that way. Little

girl, I feel so helpless.

The city far below.

I let a river pour. Our corner, no

more glass.

We had a sad contest.

Beneath your skin, you found two rivers

more. Don't cry that way.

Don't cry that way. Don't cry that way.

Little girl, I feel so helpless.

Do they know as they fight their

way upstream?

Have they a reason to know why?

Here we go into the analyzer

stream.

And when we get there, do we die?

Hey, brother, count

the ways that I am blessed.

But I am cursed with your image as

a child.

Silently,

like chicklets in the wild. Don't

cry that way.

Don't cry that way.

Don't cry that way. Little boy, I feel so

helpless. Don't cry that way.

Don't cry that way. Don't cry that way.

Little boy, I feel so helpless.

Uh, we are here with Loretta Farley, uh,

here on

KVMR, and, uh, she

is going to give us her, uh, park

update, which is wonderful.

She has informed me that this--

we will have no

discussion of dead animals in the park

this week-

... because we have exhausted that topic.

We have.

Um, and-

Um [laughs]

... I'm also with, uh, Johann, uh,

Koetzer.

If, uh,

he may jump in with some questions here

about the park.

Sure.

But Loretta, take it away.

Sure. Um, well, a little

while ago you were asking about, um,

taking mussels

out of seashore areas, and so-

I, I... That wasn't me. I've said-

Oh

... there,

there are no mussels in the back of my car

either.

Oh, no, no.

Uh, those I, I bought those. [laughs]

That's really, um... You can collect this.

We talked a little about this last time,

about mushrooms also.

But some species, um,

if you have a California State Fish

and Game license

and in-- you use

that in the federal national park as well

as in the state of

California. That just went up,

the sport fishing license.

If you're 16 and older and a resident,

it just is gonna go up to

$45.93, and then, um, you add

enhancements to it

if you're gonna do some other things like

abalone or...

You know, you can buy it for one day.

You can buy it for a year.

You can buy it for a lifetime.

And then there's special prices for

disabled folks and veterans as well.

But with your license in hand,

and usually they like you to display

it so they can see that you have it, um-

Some people wear it around their neck on

a little like chain, uh,

necklace with a little tube.

Um,

you can buy 'em at the hardware store in

town.

Building Supply still is, uh,

selling them.

But you can collect mussels, and

when you get your license,

you get a little

booklet, and you, in it,

it tells you the amount,

like you can take, which

f-for example, cockles, which

is a little type of clam or

mussels or marine seaweeds

and things like that.

So with your license in hand

and your book and your knowledge of your

take, how

much you can take,

you can go to certain areas.

Some of the areas of the park

are now closed.

The Drake's Beach area was added to, um,

the Marine Reserve, State Marine

Reserves system, I think about a year ago.

But then off Limantour

and into Tomales Bay, you can go out

and look for

clams and mussels and stuff like that.

Um, and there's a little bit of abalone,

that abaloning that goes on, though that's

a somewhat limited resource,

and that's mostly happening at,

sort of around

McClure's Beach and Tomales Point,

and that's the license plus

the what's called the abalone punch tag.

And abalone is, is pretty,

pretty well-regulated.

You have to take it out of the shell

and before you transport, it has to be a

certain size, certain limit to per day.

And any of this take or whatever

that we're talking about is for,

just for your use

at home.

It's not for any kind of commercial

collection or sales or anything like

that. So that just, we, um,

we're just chatting a little bit about,

uh,

mussels outside. They,

they do get quarantined from March to

October.

Sometimes it's a little earlier to March,

sometimes a little

later to May,

but it usually runs through October.

And at that time of year, mussels

are accumulating certain diatoms in their

flesh that if humans eat them,

it can make you ill.

So they are quarantined for a big chunk of

the year, but at this time of

year, they're not.

So a little bit about that.

So for, for $45 in at the hardware store,

you can go and, and-

Fish and take marine invertebrates and

shellfish according to the limits in the

little book they're gonna give you.

Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Thank you.

So, um, so that, and that, um, uh,

like I said, I think if, uh,

the hardware store's open today till 3:00

if you're

out there getting your New Year's Eve

dinner. No.

[laughs] So-

How about that?

Um, so anyway, uh,

I keep forgetting it's New Year's Eve.

Um, we are running the shuttle buses.

I think I talked about that last time.

We ran, we started them up on Saturday.

Beautiful day at Drake's Beach.

It was sunny and warm,

and they saw whales.

So it-

Nice

...

we're just at the beginning of the annual

gray whale

migration,

and the numbers are pretty small right

now.

I think they saw like 11,

and by the end of the day, they

were up to 19, and that's over about six

hours. So you see,

that's only about two or three an hour.

As we go into January, though,

we're gonna see more and more and more.

They go up to where we're seeing them like

10 to 20 an hour,

and this is the eastern population of the

Pacific gray whale,

who they, they're born in Mexico, uh,

but they spend most of their lives eating

in

the Arctic up in Alaska,

and they leave around November.

They head south.

We're kind of in the middle of the trip,

and it's the

longest migration of a marine mammal going

between Alaska

and Mexico.

They're in Mexico for what in human time

seems a really,

really short period of time,

just a month or two.

Not sure what that is in whale time.

And they breed, they have the,

the young calves there,

and then they bring the

calves north.

They're traveling in different what

are called pulses or

groups. Usually, the first group

that leaves Alaska are the females

that are

pregnant, and they wanna get south,

deliver that calf, nurse

it, and they're the ones that will travel.

Um, pregnant females

are always sort of the lead

or the vanguard, the first ones to

leave. Then the second pulse or group

is the

non-breeding group. They're,

they're sort of the younger ones.

They may not be,

they don't have sort of the imperative to

get down there and

deliver a calf,

so they're traveling sort of in the second

wave or the second

pulse. And last but not least,

in the third wave or the third pulse

is the females with calves,

and they bring them up the last from

Alaska,

and they travel the s-south the last

from... Excuse me.

They,

they travel south the last from Alaska

and the

last from Mexico.

So they're moving in these groups.

What we're seeing right now mostly seems

to be singular, singular whales, which

could be those pregnant females,

the first group or pulse.

And the timing on the migration has

changed a little bit in

recent years. Um,

there's some speculation

that as there's less global

ice, that there's just more food up there.

The table is sort of uncovered. They're,

they, um, gray whales have a really

distinctive feeding style, and they

were once called digger whales

because what they actually do

is under the Arctic Ocean, there

are these long canyons, and they,

they roll to the side. You're a right,

right roller or a left

roller [laughs] gray whale.

You roll to the side, and you fill up your

mouth with tons,

and I've used this word on the show

before, tube-dwelling

amphipods and grit and gravel,

and you just kind

of s- plow, plow, roll, roll,

roll along these mile-long canyons.

And there's a lot of dust under,

underwater, like

sediments flushed up, which

is good for the tube-dwelling amphipods.

So it's a very nice relationship where the

way that they feed is helpful to the

food that they eat.

And these amphipods

are in these big sort of thick mats,

and the whales just scoop them up

and eat tons and tons of them.

And by the time they roll their way

through that mile-long canyon,

go back to the

beginning of the line,

there's more amphipods

that have hatched out and are

ready to eat. So there's lots of,

of sediment

or, or mud and what,

and that's where they got sort of a common

name of a

digger whale.

So they're feeding themselves,

feeding themselves, and there's less

ice. There's more sunlight.

There's more food for them.

So they seem to be moving a little bit

later than we normally

see them,

so larger numbers coming by later than

they used to.

It's very anecdotal there, but it's,

we're beginning to see some speculation

about

that by scientists who

are studying gray whale populations from

Cal Academy. So anyway, they feed, eat,

eat, eat, and somewhere around November,

they say,

"Let's go south." So they start the trip.

They are, they're in Mexico for, again,

what appears to be a really short period

of

human time. That's where the calves

are delivered.

It's warmer, saltier water. It's denser,

so the heavy calves float.

They're nursed for quite a while. Um,

whale milk,

just to compare it, the cow's milk

that we drink is usually 1%, 2%

fat. Whale milk is, like, 50%,

so sort of like almost cottage

cheese. Very, very thick and very,

very rich.

So the calves are nursed,

and then they begin the trip north with

their

mom.

And we see them a lot easier in March

because

they're staying very,

very close to the shoreline,

and they're trying to

protect the calves as they bring them

north.

They're worried about deep water predators

like orcas and sharks-

...

who tend to be around the big canyons off

Monterey Bay.

And so they're bringing them closer in.

We see them traveling north very,

very close to the shore.

A little easier to spot,

and we'll see that in March

and a little bit into

April and sometimes even into the early

part of the summer.

So it's underway.

We're seeing them in the southern

migration, and over the weekend

in that beautiful--

those really nice days that we just had,

they def- they

saw quite a few of them.

So that's kind of the big, big excitement.

And, uh, northern elephant seals,

they're, they're continuing there.

It was kind of fun on, um,

Saturday at Drake's Beach with

really that was, like, a six-and-a-half,

seven-foot tide that came almost all the

way up to the parking lot.

And this young male elephant seal

was just surfing right [laughs] up.

He was surfing right up.

He got up fairly close in,

but then there were a number

of people watching, and so he saw that.

And they tend to,

if they see what they perceive as a

threat, which is sort of

people moving around or animals

or anything, they'll say,

"Forget this beach.

We're out of here." So he didn't actually

come up on the, the main beach there

right near the parking lot,

but he ended up a little further down the,

the beach

where, because of the high tide,

no one could really get down there, the w-

the

water was so high.

There wasn't much beach walking at Drake.

So with those big seven-foot,

six-and-a-half, seven-foot tides,

Drake's not the best place for walking,

but a good place for some

of those elephant seals.

They like to coast up on those big tides.

So that was a little bit sort of c-

covering the weekend.

Um, we are running the shuttles, um,

tomorrow. It is a federal holiday.

And then this weekend, again,

if the weather's clear,

we close the road and run

shuttle buses from Drake's Beach out to

the lighthouse in Chimney Rock.

We did have a little bit of, um,

damage as of the weekend.

Um, McClure's Beach Trail, it's a short,

steep trail out there off Pierce Point

Road. It does have a rockslide on it,

and so it's closed

currently.

And there's a fairly large tree on the Old

Pine Trail

that, um,

is gonna take a bit of work to get out of

there, so Old Pine

Trail is closed because of that big,

old tree on it.

So that's sort of a little recap of the

weekend and, and if you wanna go

fishing and things like [laughs] that.

Um, we're looking forward to, um,

more great

salmon counts. They've, they've had some--

They're waiting for the water to clear

out a little bit so they can do some more

counts.

And they've just started the elephant seal

counts.

Most of the studies on elephant seals at

Point Reyes are population, seeing the,

the numbers that are coming and

which ones are grow- how many are

growing. They're,

they tag the young seals with a little

pink

tag. Always say pink for Point Reyes.

Um, and so they're,

they sort of map where, if they can,

where they're

ending up.

One seal with a pink Point Reyes tag has

been seen as far north as Russia.

So, um, they're looking at numbers

and tagging the pups.

So the first pup was born at the park in

the main colony off

the Headlands-

... and we're waiting to hear

if there's been any pups born in the

Drake's Beach

colony, too. Always kind of fun.

So yeah.

Well, lovely. Thank you so much-

Yeah. Thank you

... uh, Loretta, and, uh, we're gonna, uh,

go to a

song, uh, and, uh, and be back.

Is there any, uh...

Oh, here we go. But-

Ah.

Thanks again.

You sure.

[singing] I used to see you at the

Ratskiller.

Sarcasm of a young fella.

Tall and mean between the pillars.

Before you drowned in a

Holland town.

You were still the muscle man

when I saw you

in a Netherland.

Alcohol and speed were friends.

You cycled around

in a Holland town.

The old pea coat is loose upon your

frame.

Your handshake is strong,

but you look so short

and your face distorts.

You speak no more

of someone to blame.

Was it here below the sea level?

You set adrift your rock and roll,

and you got a door

and lost your love

to some clever

devil.

I'm

sorry to hear about your sister.

She went too far down in the drain.

She was trying to dull her pain.

The North Sea now

is a fool on

twisters.

I wanna see you-

Different paths. Don't wanna see you in a

Holland town.

Don't wanna see you in a Holland town.

You're listening to KWMR. KWMR, uh,

support for KWMR

rather is provided by Bingham Osborn

Scarborough LLC

with, uh, offices in San Francisco,

Silicon Valley, and Healdsburg, providing

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More information available at

415-781-8535 or

online at bossinvest.com. That's

B-O-S-invest.com.

Support is also provided by PRBO

Conservation

Science,

a local nonprofit dedicated to conserving

birds, other

wildlife,

and ecosystems through scientific research

and

outreach, offering bird walks,

an annual birdathon,

and access to the Palmarin Field Station

in Bolinas at

prbo.org. One can learn more about their

projects and get involved.

This is the local.org radio blog. Uh,

today we're focused on

colonialism and education and this,

this, uh, relationship between

the civilization,

if you wanna call it that, of, of

children, but also the,

the civilization of adults and

how, uh,

I guess in a sense how they relate,

but also just how they differ between

worlds.

You know, how do we, uh, teach children?

Is it a socialization process?

Is it a violence prevention

process?

Uh, is it,

um, just a,

a janitorial institution so that the,

the adults

can all go to work?

Uh, on the other hand, is... So is

that institution, is its own purpose?

Is the public school, uh,

just simply an ideal to which we must

conform,

but which does not serve any other ideal?

Similarly, is, is, is the, the empire

self-justifying? Is it its own purpose

or does it serve some

other purpose?

Um, we'll start with, uh, some

recent writing of Christopher Britt.

You've heard him in recent shows.

He wrote a piece called The Imperial

Idiot,

uh, The Parable of the Half-Breed,

which he read in the last show,

and now has

a sort of addendum to,

to The Imperial Idiot.

It's a blog you can find on local.org

and,

but he just recorded this for us last

night.

The education of an imperial idiot.

Let us recall the original meaning of the

word idiot.

For the classical Greeks who coined the

term,

an idiot was someone who would dedicate

himself to private

preoccupations

rather than concern himself with public

affairs.

Idiots are selfish.

They're fixated on themselves

and they are myopic.

They are unable to see the many ways in

which their personal

experience relates to broader social,

political,

and economic realities.

Let us also call to

mind what it means to be imperial.

The word empire comes to us from the Latin

noun

imperium,

which designates a rule or a command,

and the imperium itself

is derived from the Latin verb

imperare,

meaning to command.

So an emperor is someone who first

and foremost commands.

He is the commander-in-chief.

When people who are not emperors behave as

though

they were,

we say that they behave imperially.

Bringing these two terms together,

we form the idea of an

imperial idiot,

a selfish brat who

is blind to the world and who

also happens to be extremely bossy.

Does this sound like anyone you know?

Let us finally keep in mind also what it

means to

educate.

This term comes to us from Latin as well,

specifically from the verb educare, which

means to guide.

With this meaning in mind,

let us now ask the question

we'd all really like to ask.

What can it possibly mean to educate an

imperial idiot?

What sort of guidance must a person

receive in order to

become not just an idiot, but a bossy one

to boot?

A selfish disregard for the rest of the

world is

easy enough to cultivate.

Simply appeal to your student's narcissism

and surround him with images of himself.

Enclose him in a mirror world,

a world of deception where everything

is like everything else,

a world of sameness that loves only itself

because there's nothing

and no one else to love.

If the idiot is encased in this

narcissistic sameness,

how can you also breed in him an imperial

regard

toward the world?

How can you get him to command the world?

How can you teach him to give commands?

After all, for him to boss people

and to boss

things around,

he must first understand that they

are fundamentally different from him

This, surely, is the paradox

that any good educator

will need to solve in order to cultivate

his student and

turn him into an imperial idiot.

Now, that I can think of, there

are two methods by

means of which idiots can be taught to

become imperial.

The first involves the gradual

introduction of differences into the

narcissistic idiot's view.

Look, you might say to your pupil,

here's something that's not the same.

You could start this off with

that silly game they used to present on

Sesame Street called

Which One of These Things Does

Not Belong.

So take, for instance, baseball,

basketball,

American football,

and soccer.

What do you think, little Johnny?

Which one of these things does not belong?

Why, you're right, Johnny. Soccer does not

belong.

What would you like us to do with the

soccer ball, Johnny?

Oh, you'd like us to blow it up?

No problem, Johnny.

We'll take care of it for you on the

double.

In this manner,

Johnny manages to maintain the

sameness of his world

while cultivating the habit of bossing

people around

in order to maintain

that very same sameness.

This is the sort of education

that cultivates hardy

imperialistic habits.

It is somewhat reminiscent of the

strenuous life teachings

so thoughtfully preached by Teddy

Roosevelt those many years

ago.

Now,

the second method for educating imperial

idiots

places much less stress

on the imperial aspect and emphasizes

the idiotic.

As an educator, you can guide your pupil

ever deeper into his already profound

idiocy to the point, in fact,

that he will continue to

reap the benefits of his imperial command

without ever needing

to utter a command as a command.

All he will need to do to satisfy his

desires is

act on them.

No need to communicate them to anyone

else.

Now, in order for this method to succeed,

your

pupil will need to be provided with

samples of just about everything

under the sun.

He must lead an opulent lifestyle like a

fortunate child in a candy shop who can

afford to have anything

he wants.

Or like the lowly office clerk

who on his way home from work last night

stopped off at the pharmacy to

purchase some toothpaste and

was given a splendid array of

toothpastes from which to choose.

What the child in the candy store

and the clerk at the pharmacy

failed to recognize, however, is

that their choices

are false.

This is the beauty of this method.

The child is eating candy regardless of

which one he chooses and the clerk

is staring at

rows upon rows of toothpaste,

toothpaste and

nothing but toothpaste.

Sameness prevails.

The idiot may not have commanded his world

to remain the same.

But

by purchasing candy or toothpaste,

he feeds

the opulent society

that keeps him smiling.

That was a very low recording,

so we're going to come up slowly here and

not shock you if you had to turn up your

radio there, but that was Christopher

Britt in his piece Imperial Idiot.

You can find the writings of Christopher

Britt at local.org.

Imperial Idiot is another piece,

and this piece, The

Education of an Imperial Idiot,

was written expressly for the

purpose of this show

to break into a discussion of both,

if you want to call it,

post-colonization and

also homeschooling, or each of

them in a sense being a kind of

recovery from institutions

that have failed.

And in the case of the empire,

the failure is essentially in the idea of

the civilizing mission of those empires,

leaving a sort of detritus of people,

displaced people

and refugees and

post-colonists like myself, whose

family came from

mostly

the British Isles

centuries ago.

Or like Johan here, who lives in

South Africa and who comes from a family

hundreds of years

in that place.

And so we live in these places,

and we have our institutions in these

places.

Those institutions really come from

that civilizing

mission and the principles

that we apply to our civil society

and to our children

in many ways

are related to those we apply to

political systems that have to

broker

a change from crown colony corporation

to state government to legislature to

nation and to this new entity which

always claims in a sense a newness,

a new right, a new

entitlement to govern.

and to represent the society, which

is what we have,

um, today. And, uh, so with us here,

uh, we've just got Julia Peters,

who's come in the room, and, uh,

shortly we'll have Elizabeth Barnett,

and the two of them

will, will be, uh, focused on, uh,

homeschooling.

I'll also join the discussion because

Julia and I are homeschooling the same

children,

uh, and so ha-have, uh, uh, you know,

lots of ideas from experience, uh, both,

you know,

a-as educators of our children,

but also as citizens who are, you

know, who, who, uh, have, have elected

to, to a certain extent to,

to live independently

of, of, uh, institutions, and particularly

schools. Uh, but, but, you know,

consider that to be an

important part as an American of,

of recovering

from, [clears throat] from a repressive

and, um, ignorance-producing,

uh, civil society, an illiterate society,

uh, one of

the most politically illiterate societies

in the world, the United States,

which once prided itself on its high level

of political literacy.

Our newspapers, uh, monopolies,

boring,

virtually unreadable,

uh,

and so requiring a conformity in the adult

population, which

is also in evidence in, in

the schools, which are essentially run as,

as refugee camps or fortresses requiring

policing, uh, metal detectors. Uh,

the focus of the

school is,

is on preventing the children from harming

each other and

on, on preventing deviance,

uh, and so, uh,

widespread use of antipsychotic

drugs, an-anti-anxiety drugs to make the

children be quiet. Uh, and within this,

the

presumption that education, this,

this word comes from the

past, uh, is taking place,

and great efforts made to

standardize the processes to ensure

that it takes place, and yet in the

case of America,

obviously not taking place.

[clears throat] Well, good morning, Julie.

Thank you for, uh, joining us.

Oh, good to be here.

If I can just join in there with, um-

This is Johan.

Hi.

Hello.

With what Paul said, um,

I've made a few observations here and

also observations with my travels all over

the world

and the recent violence in the schools

and,

yeah, yours is not an isolated case.

It's a worldwide problem.

And, um, where does it come from? I mean,

there's, there's so

many international similarities between

not only South Africa and

America,

but also a lot of other countries.

If you go back to the colonial debate, um,

we're dealing here with a deep underlying

juvenile anger.

This is all a cause of a genetic imprint

of savage and

violent takeovers,

I think, that we deal with,

and we're sitting here at schools angry

at we don't know what.

We don't know what our culture was.

We can read in books.

We don't know who we are in today's life.

I got a Tswana kid sitting listening to

English lessons in a

university that he doesn't care about,

but he has to now prove

himself in a economical world

that he has no

belief in and that he doesn't understand.

But in order to get his next meal,

he needs to perform in these areas.

And, um,

I think if you can understand this,

um,

you can also understand how to channel

this anger and

violence. And up until you have a

system that can teach your children the

way

and things that you see important,

you're never gonna solve this.

You're gonna have guns at schools.

You're gonna have swords.

We recently had a,

um,

issue in South Africa where a kid came

with a

samurai sword and chopped the janitor into

pieces and some of his

schoolmates. So it's not only a gun,

and it's not only an American problem.

As I say, it's,

I think it's a deep underlying anger of

not

only colonial savage takeovers

and how we deal with it, but

our recent and,

and ways how we're gonna school our

children.

This is a big decision

that lies on the mind of each and every

parent, I think.

Certainly.

And, and it, it, I think it,

it also relates to how the parents have to

survive

and, uh, in a, uh,

in, in a sense is a,

is a complement to the system of labor,

uh, that requires that adults and children

separate, uh, a lot and increasingly

not j- uh, just a lot, but, but

that both parents have to separate, right?

That's the... essentially

that both parents have to work.

Uh, and so the school becomes a, a,

uh, an alternative to the family.

Uh, oddly, th-this w- this idea was,

was idealized

by,

uh,

by, uh,

the So- Soviet communist, uh,

intellectuals

of the early 20th century. The idea

that families would give up raising

children

and, and, and commit themselves to work

was a,

was a actually fairly extreme communist,

uh,

view,

but it's been universally accepted by

Americans.

And, and it's not just by Americans,

but by the so-called, uh, modern

world,

um, which I agree with you,

it's not uniquely American,

but we're certainly

innovators in this,

in this area in terms of persuading the

public

that it cannot be fulfilled except if,

if it do- if, if

it separates, and

that women who raise children

are unfulfilled or that

men who raise children are unfulfilled,

uh, I think is,

has become a common sort of, if not an

explicit ideology, an implicit

uh, attitude,

um-

Well, a necessary one. I mean,

you can choose to believe it

or not believe it, but

you have to deal with the reality of

having to be outside of your home all day.

We're joined now, and I should say this

is a Local.org radio blog,

and we're coming

up to the top of the hour,

but we're joined now by Elizabeth Barnett,

uh, as well.

Good morning, Elizabeth.

Hi. Thank you for having this program.

I just caught part of it on the way over.

Thank you.

Elizabeth would be,

would be known to many of the listeners,

uh, for her

work locally in Point Reyes with, uh,

West Marin Commons

and, and,

and by a member of the community for a

number of years.

Uh, but she's known to me in part, uh, as,

as

another, uh, local,

uh, person who's, uh, homeschooled her

children in great part. And so in fact,

we've shared some schooling

of children and, uh,

of, of each other's children,

I guess we'd say.

Uh,

and so have a fairly intimate experience

around the

challenges of homeschooling,

'cause it's certainly,

uh... You know,

we don't,

I don't mean to put homeschooling forward

as some sort

of a revolution against the, the system,

uh, because it

certainly wasn't what motivated, uh, me,

or I don't think it motivated

Julia either in getting started. Uh,

it had more to do, at least for

me, with,

with my own experience in schools,

having attended public

schools in, in the Bay Area,

particularly Oakland and Richmond,

uh, which were, you know,

hideously dysfunctional institutions,

and which I note to be today

still hideously dysfunctional

institutions.

The children very much resembling the

hideously dysfunctional imperial

idiots that I knew as a sixth, seventh,

eighth grader.

And, and it was that, that really, uh,

sort of

vivid, um, acknowledgement of, of

that condition in the schools that,

that made me, it so obvious to me that

I wouldn't want my children in those,

in those institutions.

But Elizabeth, uh, yeah,

let's just jump into it.

You sent me an email last night.

We talked about it, and it's...

How, how, how would you like to proceed?

Well, like, I guess I c- I didn't...

I had good schooling experiences-

Hmm

... and, um, was a successful student and,

um, was in the best

school systems in the US supposedly,

in Boulder,

Colorado, Oak Park, Illinois, Brookline,

Massachusetts.

Okay.

And, um,

and our decision to homeschool was

not a rejection of anything

that we actually looked

at closely.

Um, but it was an ex- I, I would say,

I'd say it was an e- extension

of our parenting.

It was a continuation of our parenting.

So, um, I don't know.

Uh, I mean, the problem is that we're,

we are all products of these

school systems,

and therefore it's the heart...

I mean, so trying to, uh, critique

education or our own schooling is, uh,

is difficult because we're

products of it, and yet we're, you know,

then we're trying to decide how to

[sniffs] teach or what w-

what's best for our kids.

And, um, I suppose

moving a lot, I don't know,

there's certain things

that allow you to get outside

of your own upbringing. So, um,

for me, there's, you know, maybe it

was moving a lot,

just having a different kind

of a life than somebody who stayed in one

place, maybe in one public

school system, allowed me to feel

alienated in a certain sense from,

from what, um, was standard,

but also allowed me to create, you know,

to

feel the independence to,

to consider my own

take on what was important to learn and,

and how

I wanted to,

how I interact with my own kids too.

Okay.

I mean, the other thing

is I'm not sure how much people...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this,

but I'm not sure how much people enjoy

being with children.

Hmm.

And, um,

[sniffs] I did enjoy being with children.

Sometimes that surprised people.

I mean, people really quest-

certain would really question me about

that.

Why would I

choose-

Children

... especially beyond three years old,

to stay with my kids,

but even before three

years old.

Uh-huh. Yeah.

So the, having, you know,

finding my children-

Hmm

...

intelligent and worth interacting and, and

learning myself from these experiences

was sort of

part of the big adventure.

Hmm. That was-

And not something I was going to,

you know, necessarily hand over to...

Well, certainly I wouldn't have,

didn't hand it over to a system that I had

an option not to ha- to hand,

hand it over to.

Hmm.

Hmm.

I think homeschooling

is also a hot topic in South Africa

now more than ever,

and especially myself and my wife, who's,

um, my wife is from American origin.

And we've been recently having this

conversation, well, not so recently,

for the

past few years, as our son

is now turning four in five months'

time.

Um, yeah, who do you want, do you,

who do you want your

children to be raised by? A teacher

that you pay a

measly salary and who's angry to be there?

[laughs] Or what, what,

what do you want your child to be?

I mean, uh, there's just no,

no question really if you

think about it. Raise your child to,

to your,

to your needs of the modern world,

and also prepare them for what they can,

and I

think there's no better place than home

for that.

I think also one-

Did you, uh, Julia, did you-

Um, one, one of the subjects that Paul

was touching on that sort of relates to

this, uh, when he

was discussing the Soviet system

or the Prussian

system,

which was more the basis for our own

system, Fordism,

corporatism was, was the init-

initial sort of basis and model

that kind of created the, uh,

the school day, the bell going

off, and the ways in

which you could conform to

that system of learning, which

would ultimately

prepare you to go into the marketplace

and fit into that system as well.

Um, but I think ultimately, the,

the question for me is: where is the

locus of control in your life? Uh,

in other words, in this country

in particular, you know, around 1850,

75% of the

families in this country

were independent farmers.

And so that for the, for s- for

that sense of independence,

the way in which it

makes you feel to be independent in your

own life, and however difficult

it, it really was, and it

was greatly difficult for,

for many people at that time.

[clears throat] But I believe it created a

sense of,

a familial sense and a,

and a locus of control, a cultural, uh,

control that was localized to the home.

Um, and you know,

mandatory public education only occurred

around 1870, I believe.

So it's still a fairly new

idea, I think, generally speaking.

Oh my God.

Uh, and so-

I'm sorry, we lost you there for a moment,

Julia.

Oh. Oh.

I, uh, I turned, uh, uh, uh,

off the wrong mic, so sorry

for the, the, uh,

technical difficulty there.

Oh.

It was only for 20 seconds.

I have to say quickly, it is coming up to

9:02, and, uh, this is KWMR 90.5 Point Ray

Station, 89.9 Bolinas. And, uh,

local programming is

underwritten by listeners like you

and by West Marin Senior Services, a

nonprofit agency, uh,

helping seniors to live long, uh,

live well,

and live at home. Uh, 24-hour care

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a licensed assisted living home in Point

Ray Station.

Information and volunteer opportunities

available at

415-663-8148 or online

at wmss.org. I'm sorry, I, I,

I meant to, to turn myself off.

It's totally fine. [laughs]

And I, I turned you off. I don't know.

It's, it's, uh-

Oh, it's okay. I'll,

I'll just repeat maybe

that last bit of that, which is-

Sure

... I was just speaking about the,

sort of the locus of control and how that

relates to your sense of self. I

was speaking about the independence of

the farmer,

75% family farms in the United States in

1850.

In 1950, that number was more like 2%.

Uh,

there are a lot of small businesses

and independent, uh, ways that people

are conducting their lives.

You don't necessarily have to,

to have your own

economy to do that,

but it's an example of, of how it is that

you can convey a sense of independence,

um, in, in what you're

teaching. Uh, and I think for me,

that's another, a- another

aspect of, of all of this, so.

Definitely. I, I often think, uh,

one of the key challenges for

homeschooling is the relationship to

knowledge.

Uh, and, and the fact is, is that in,

in a public

school, the relationship to knowledge

is based upon this,

uh, uh,

aggressively triaged or f- or, uh,

um, aran- arrangement of knowledge into a

system which...

And Christopher Britt mentioned it in a

piece we played earlier,

unfortunately, when, before you got here.

But where he, he, he asks, you know,

"How do you, how do you

an ed- educate an imperialist?

And, and what, you know,

how do you make him so bossy?

How do you make him so selfish,

so narrow-minded?"

Uh, if, uh, and, and, and so he's...

This is a professor at George Washington

University, uh, who, you know, who,

who is, uh, pri- you know, is, is,

who's had hundreds of students.

Uh, you know, and, and so he,

he knows what he's talking about

as far as the, the, you know,

the quality of, of the American

18-year-old. It's incredibly low,

particularly,

I mean, on, on a, uh, historical standard.

I mean, if you go back 100 years

and consider the literacy

of, of, uh, your, your average American,

they knew all

about what was happening in the world.

They knew all about what

was happening in politics.

Uh, they had political, um, theories.

They were, were, were, uh, you know, um,

they read political theory.

They argued about political theory.

Now, how many Americans have you met

that do that, okay?

It's, we've gone to the opposite end of,

of the spectrum in terms

of the, the type of product that our,

that our education

factories is, is, is intended to produce,

and the key to that

is this relationship to, to knowledge.

And so today in the schools,

very few schools teach history as a

subject, for example. Now,

from my point of view,

that, that's,

that has an Orwellian quality.

The, the idea that the past,

the generic discussion of the past

would no longer be acknowledged

and instead would be re-encapsulated in

words like

social science. Now,

I remember I ended up getting, you know,

advanced degrees in history, right?

But in the sixth, seventh grade,

I couldn't read that

stuff.

They were giving me social science books

that looked like

dumbed-down news magazines of the past,

and, uh, that

essentially convey this concept

or gestalt,

which, which is that the past is known.

It's a bunch of documents.

You don't know the documents,

but you have to learn them.

And so we'll give you the basics,

and then if

you wanna pursue an advanced degree,

you go from there.

In other words, the history is, is, is,

uh, i- it's not a

question. The history is not political.

There are no debates. Everything is known.

Theory

is obsolete.

That is the implicit message in that.

Theory is obsolete.

Your idea about the past,

any ideas you have are irrelevant,

have no meaning.

You have to let go of those opinions

in order to absorb what is known.

That's the message.

And so if you take

that attitude toward knowledge,

you can't educate your

children because you don't,

you're not qualified.

You're not educated in every subject,

and if knowledge is simply a bunch of

stacks

of documents that must be known,

then we're all half people.

And so, but the ed-

homeschooling always involves,

to a certain extent,

crossing knowledge.

It's like a small liberal arts college

where you, instead

of s- of, of bringing in specialists, you,

you de- depend upon generalists,

and, and then you,

you know, you organize a more sort of, uh,

if

you wanna say individuated relationship to

knowledge.

But ironically,

that actually gives you a broader original

relationship to actual knowledge.

So I think part of this,

I'm speaking too much here, but part of

the challenge that with homeschooling is,

as Elizabeth mentioned,

part of it is the desire to be with your

children.

And that's a big, I think,

a big question mark for a lot of people

who,

although I think a lot of people have been

conditioned to not want to be with their

children.

And once you have a certain amount of

alienation, then it's painful to be

around them because they're not really

your children.

And so you feel the alienation in their

presence.

But the second one

is once you decide you want to be with

your children or already

want to be and love to be,

then it's this feeling of inadequacy.

If you have what I would say a conformist

view or institutional

view of knowledge that

is essentially the calling card of the

public school.

Product of an institution.

Can you believe that?

You want to make yourself a product of an

institution,

which means you also,

the challenges of the modern day cultural

piling now

becomes a part of your child's underlying

problems.

I think it's a good thing to live

and stay and learn about

cultures, but I think you should do

that from home.

We're sitting with basically a problem

here,

and some people may see it as a problem,

others might see it as a blessing, where

we in South Africa have 11 official

languages.

Afrikaans, English,

that's the two most common ones known

by everybody else. But you've got Ndebele,

Sutu,

Swazi, Tonga, Venda, Xhosa, Sutu, Zulu,

Tswana.

I mean, there's Fanagalo.

That's 11 that's officially

recognized, and there's about 15 that

is also spoken

other than the 11 official ones.

So you've got these

cultures from all over.

One guy wants to come with his little

leopard skin to school.

The other guy needs to come in

trousers, socks, tie.

Now, how do you handle all of that?

I think that is

a problem caused by modern civilization,

and

like I said earlier,

a cultural piling of kids.

And

what does your child pull out of that?

How do you determine that?

You don't determine it because you sit

behind your PC at

work doing what you do to get money home

to feed them.

Yeah.

So to me, it's, yeah.

It's painful.

The painful underbelly of education is

really labor and the fact that

the modern lifestyle says

that both parents have to work eight hours

a

day. And so if that's happening,

then you just have this different

bandwidth in which

you can do whatever you're going to do,

but it's not the same.

Yeah. I mean,

the other thing besides do you want to be

with your children is can you be with

your children?

Yeah.

And

so we're all

unable to create our own lives, you know,

because we're

stuck in systems that we're stuck in.

Fear of the unknown, I'd say.

A lot of people are afraid of

homeschooling.

They don't know.

But what we're saying is

that it's your job.

I mean, for you, once you get to

that point, because,

you know,

can you arrange a way of making a

living where you don't have to leave all

the time?

And that's really

for our society here,

we also have the suburban

sprawl factor, which is

that people have moved

60 miles away from their place of work in

order to afford to own a

house. And so it's just impossible.

They have to drive two hours a day

and work eight hours a day.

You know, there goes the evenings.

And so there really

is no way to do it unless you can change

and

control your labor.

So it's related to the loss of freedom,

right?

And to the

so-called rationalization of

the labor sector so that all men and women

are expected to work or

are perceived as failures.

And so that de facto means that the

state is raising the children,

yet there was no acknowledgement

that that's what

they were doing.

If they had projected that as a policy,

if the government had

actually proposed as a policy

that it would require everyone

to work and that it would henceforth be

responsible for these things, I

don't think the voters would have approved

that.

But yet it was somehow embraced. It

was like Christopher Britt's child in the

candy shop.

It could pick whatever candy it wanted,

but it couldn't pick

anything but candy. And so you've got your

flavor, you know.

Who gives illusions of options.

I did catch that part of his

lecture.

I wonder if that's why people spend so

much money on conspicuously elegant

automobiles, you know,

that it's the candy.

You know, it's the thing for

which you sacrifice your life, the emblem.

The way I put it growing up in Flint,

Michigan was that because the place

that you

came from and the place you

were going to lacked

or entirely drained of

significance or meaning, the way in

which you got in between those two points

became very, very important. So this

is the role of having a car that looks a

particular way or indicates something,

you know, other than the fact

that you're in

motion. It's your comfort.

Well, yeah.

So we're here with Julia Peters

and Elizabeth Barnett,

Johan Kutzier and Paul Fenn. My name

is Charles Schulz.

This is Local.org Radio Blog on education.

And I think we're going to have a quick

song here and be right back with everyone.

Hey sleepy monster in the

sand. Time to get up and have a

drink. Pacific Rim has a tank that

thinks that she is really something

great. Let me tell you about when I was

hanging out just in my dodgy.

Running in the dawn right across my lawn,

I saw a coyote.

Olé, olé, olé for

Mulholland. See the water

fall. Hoo-ray, hoo-ray, the

ants are crawling down Bradbury's

Mall.

Olé, olé, olé for

Mulholland.

All waxed and fried,

I got a comfortable ride.

And man, she could take us

out across the salt

and out of these faults

and on into Vegas.

So slept a monster in the dune.

Woke him up and then he drank.

Pacific Rim has a think tank,

but does she have IQ for the need?

The

concrete of the aqueduct will last as

long as the pyramids of Egypt or the

Parthenon of Athens,

long after Joe Harriman

is elected mayor of

Los Angeles.

Olé, olé, olé for

Mulholland. See the water

fall. And hoo-ray, hoo-ray, the

ants are crawling down on Bradbury's

Mall. Olé, olé,

olé for Mulholland. Yeah, it's

quite a spill. So hoo-ray,

hoo-ray, the sky is falling

down on Bradbury's Mall. Olé,

olé, olé for Mulholland.

Olé!

[clears throat] This is, uh,

the local.org radio blog on KWMR.

Uh,

we're discussing education and empire,

the follow-up on Christopher Britt's, uh,

piece, "Education of an Imperial

Idiot." Uh,

you can find "The Imperial Idiot" at

local.org.

Uh, but we're right now fo-

just focused on in a sense a view from the

other side of the, of the barrel of,

of American

education, and that is

homeschooling, you know, from f-

the challenges of homeschooling,

uh,

as they relate to

the, um,

both the, the proletarianization of,

of America where,

where people don't control their,

their labor,

and people don't control their time,

and therefore they,

they must submit to a regime,

uh, of management for their children.

Um, on the other side of it, the,

the conformism that, that we

all suffer as a result of a half-century

Cold War,

uh,

conformism with an education,

uh,

in which knowledge has been essentially

bored down into a pablum of,

of,

of known,

um, facts,

ultimately, uh, without any kind of, of,

uh,

political, um,

uh, valence, without any, without any

history in that sense.

And, and the difficulty of homeschooling,

um, and the challenges in terms of both,

you know, as Elizabeth Barnett said,

wanting to

spend your life with your children

and to be with your children,

wanting, you know, to have

that life versus the life of, of

self-realization through career

or through consumption.

Um, going out and spending your money and,

and realizing

yourself in, in, in all the ways that,

that one, that one

consumes apart from education.

So we're here with Julia Peters,

Elizabeth Barnett, you know

and could see her.

And let me say quickly, I, I, as a,

having been a school teacher at a private

school for one year, the,

the parents would just,

had a sort of thought

that the extra disposable income, say

to buy their children cars

and things like that, was in fact what the

children wanted from their parents.

Mm.

So this was the trade-off. But I'm sorry,

please.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, I was just, uh, gonna touch on, uh,

something Paul mentioned about, um,

this, this idea of,

of taking the responsibility

actually of, of the education, which

for... Of course, for me,

having been educated public schools,

private schools,

private college, whatever, um, to

[clears throat] consider myself capable of

doing that.

In other words, that I had, I think,

moved so far into what I can only

say, at, in, at least in part,

is very much the comfort of the

institution.

The comfort of somebody else being

responsible, uh,

for anything in our lives. I mean, we,

you know, all the professions, you, you

know, are going to the doctor,

going to the lawyer, all the, you know,

sort of all the mediation in dealing with,

you know, all of these issues of our

lives and the ways in

which we sort of rely on these,

these professionals

who are kind of outside of ourselves to

the point where, you know, there are many

people quite critical of the idea of

homeschooling, feeling that it, it doesn't

properly socialize a child. That,

you know, that now we've,

we've just come to the

idea that being with 25 other children of

your same exact age-

Mm.

You know, 40 hours a week is just,

it's just the norm now.

Uh, and that there

are professionals who know,

know how to diagnose, you know, ADD,

ADHD, you know,

all of the various learning diffi-

difficulties

that children have, and that, and

that you have a whole body of the,

this cadre of

people who, who manage that. Um,

I think that's one

source of, of, of I think why a school is,

is... continues to be perpetuated in

that way.

But the second thing I think too is

that given that people have given up, in a

way, so much, I think, familial

and sort of village control,

and how difficult

it is to maintain any form of community,

school now for many people have be- has

become the, uh,

the very central part of their community.

Um,

and so I think it's also a place where

people now rely upon

this interaction of, of a,

of a communal life, which I

believe is largely an artificial

construct.

Of course, there are variations, there

are different forms of education.

There are Waldorf, there's Montessori,

there are private, public, and,

and so this is not to say that, you know,

that people, I think, have extremely

positive experiences within different

forms of, of these,

uh, varieties of education.

But nonetheless, it is still an

institution outside of oneself

that seeks to,

uh, if not replace,

at least in many ways serve at least as an

other family. Uh, and

if you think about most schooling, it's

year to year, different teachers,

sometimes different schools, that this

is this

somehow repetitive,

uh, it's like a, a circular way of,

of interpreting

community that would only make sense in

the end to, to continue with

someone moving on into the institution of,

as their working life, or continue to

rely on that outside professionalized

other.

Um, but I myself,

as someone who grew up in

that conformist society,

struggle with it all the time. You know,

how would, you know, am I, is this, is

this alternative

really better? And I, I know that it is,

and yet I'm, I've, I've

grown up so immersed in those institutions

that it is still a challenge for

me.

Well, the compartmentalizing of, um,

the portions of our lives and,

um... I mean, I'm thinking,

as you're talking about schools and,

and young people

and the alt- options for Waldorf

and all the rest,

I'm thinking about old people-

Mm.

And, um,

what happens in the later stages of our

lives.

And, you know,

and you're talking about being in a peer

group of, or

a group of people all the same age.

Primary, you know, generally is the way

it is in the school other than the

teachers who are in a different,

um, place of authority, of course.

Um,

and then I think of, you know,

our old home, old age

homes, and those folks together with the

people [chuckles] of the same age

and the isolation

that... I mean, in a sense, I mean,

I think of that, that I can think

of senior homes as a place of isolation,

and yet we don't think of,

of children's

centers, kindergartens or,

or grades as a place of

isolation. And yet

when you think about those within the

range

of the, the age, stages of our

lives, um, I just,

I see a lot of compartments.

And, um,

and, and you're saying also that you,

you struggle with the,

what you grew up with that is that,

is that that is the standard of what we

expect,

and what we're educating i-

in the normal system

is what we're educating

for, is to go into the next system, next

compartment and then into the next

compartment, and so this sort of

disintegration of our lives.

One of the big questions, um,

I've always been asking

is,

'cause I come from a sport background

where we played rugby

and athletics, where this

was a big part of my daily

activity. I mean,

I just went through school

and listened to the blah, blah,

blah they gave me, so I

can go to practice afterwards and,

and join my peers in

rugby practice and all of this. And

homeschooling does not,

does not have to be, um, like you say,

isolation from other

kids.

We have, uh, investigated and found

that there's very large groups of people

doing homeschooling

and interacting with each other's groups,

where you got a parent or ex-teacher

or somebody

Very educated in a certain field.

You get him in certain days

of the week, and he

teaches to different groups,

including your own, and you interact

with each other.

Hopefully you get a strong enough group to

form a rugby team.

Yeah.

We put our boys on the soccer teams here,

and certainly they have

that, uh, social

interaction, the sailing camp, all

that kind of stuff.

Uh, and w- in our case, we've also, uh,

spent some money on getting

and filling our gaps, you know.

So we have a, uh, we have the, uh,

couple of, of, uh, of, uh, local geniuses,

a, a music teacher.

Uh, in fact, they're sisters.

Uh, a music teacher and a,

and a math teacher and who,

who grew up next door to

us.

And, uh,

so they fill in our gaps because Julie

and I are stronger in, you know, in

politics and history, all

that sort of thing.

Uh, and so there's definitely a,

a mixing and matching that's involved,

I think.

And part of the challenge for a lot of

people who homeschool is that it'll be a

single parent at home while the other,

the other parent's away working.

And so a single parent

is supposed to handle the whole

education. That's really hard.

You need at least two

people, and if you, and

if you have two ...

Julie and I do it, and then

if we have other people,

we had Elizabeth for a time.

We've had...

And then these other teachers,

we can sort of pull it off

and, uh, uh,

where it doesn't feel like they're falling

behind

in any subject area. But again,

it goes back to that relationship to

knowledge.

What does it mean to fall behind in a

subject area?

[laughs] Yeah, what-

I mean, is the education of,

of a person just this accumulation of

known facts,

or is it a process of enlightenment,

which is

the, the individual's organic engagement

with

these remnants of the past,

these scripts of paper, these books, the,

uh,

whatever it is,

and relating to it in whatever way

in a, in a coherent,

and I would say specifically theoretical,

relationship, aware of its relationship to

that knowledge and actively,

subjectively engaged with that knowledge.

I would say that that is an education,

and that was w- the, the traditional,

strangely, idea of education, uh,

which you don't find,

uh, when it's just a bunch of, of,

of dead facts.

And so it's,

it's odd because there's an anxiety in

homeschooling that you maybe

are missing out on something,

and there's a risk that you are.

I'm not saying there isn't. Uh,

but there's this other benefit that's,

that I've never seen in a public school.

I certainly haven't. I

was put in a private school

and high school, and I got to

see it.

Then I was sent to universities where I

got to see that's knowledge, you

know, real knowledge, which

is very subjective, which is very

theoretical,

but not this sort of, you know, uh,

pick up the, the

rock, you know,

and put it in the bucket sort of

model that you have, uh,

in institutional environments, which is so

deadening, so boring, and so at,

much at the

foundation of the indolence of American

teenagers, and I would say,

you know, teenagers worldwide today,

that these institutions have bored

them into a stupor. Uh-

Well, it's, it's ... Well,

it relates also to, to the idea

that you're ...

It's not just about what you're, what the,

the facts, as you say, or the, the

knowledge that you're, um,

attempting to confer within the

setting of the school. But it is, it

is itself a reflection of the

cultural milieu

of, of the time in which you're living,

and that's another big question for

me about school, is the cultural milieu.

Uh, I've- We have two sons, um,

particularly around sort of the, you know,

one

who's around the middle school age, is,

uh, so much, uh, about the

virtual world now. Um, your texting,

your iPhone-ing, your, you

know, um, computer games. This, this,

this virtual world,

the, you know,

sort of the entertainment world, um, the

consumption world, that those, all of the,

the values that, that

we see that we may not happen to agree,

uh, with that

are very present in those institutions,

I think is another extremely

important part of considering

homeschooling, you know, within

that context.

Mm-hmm.

I think we're gonna transition over to,

uh,

colonization, and this would be the,

[laughs] the adult

population segment of our show.

But before that, I think we'll, we'll play

another tune by, uh, Frank Black.

We've been relying on him

exclusively today from t- uh,

a couple of albums, also known as

Black Francis. Uh,

you can find his work at blackfrancis.net.

This is, uh,

This is The Hostess With The Mostest.

There's

gold lips in queue.

They blink o'er the floor

of her majestic halls in a dew.

I hear surf on Kazoo, and I march with the

militia of a mime.

Malicious all the times.

Malicious.

In the dope we are blue.

Transcended plate and

doors and the majestic stalls in the

blue.

Waves break on the shore of this moon,

and I see how her racial show has changed.

Imaginary flames. Imagine.

I hit the mall on every

Friday.

Yeah.

When it was big and-

This

is Katie of MR, the local.org radio blog,

and we're going to transition

now from our discussion of

education into really the broader

discussion of civil

society

as it relates to imperialism.

And we're gonna start out

with a new piece

that Charles Schulz has written for this

show, which is called

A Charity Rush in Africa.

Thank you, Paul.

And I have an extensive quote here from

Oscar Wilde,

so when the language gets much more

elegant and clear, you'll

understand where he's come in.

A Charity Rush in Africa.

For those in America with an

empathetic concern for Africa,

usually highly

sentimental in their conception of history

and purpose, there is charity

adventure travel.

Stanford grads spending two weeks at a

time studying

the meerkats of Africa

or setting up solar panels

in Kenyan villages before returning home

to post photos

documenting their exotic humanity,

Sans Frontier,

to the websites containing their internet

identities, their post-ideological

public selves.

Well, what is wrong with African charity?

So what?

One solar panel more

is a worthy thing, and I even admit

that meerkats are

cute. Take this one statistic. The

West gives $50 to $80 billion in

charitable aid to Africa every year.

And in the opposite direction,

$500 to $800 billion,

tenfold, of African wealth

is transferred by African politicians and

businessmen to offshore Western banks

every year.

Essentially, for just $1 we give,

we drain 10 times the

amount of money that we invest in charity.

And this process of capital being

dislocated and then reconcentrated in the

West is just a part of a massive transfer

of wealth from

Africa that is constantly occurring.

I met a man once who set up libraries in

sub-Saharan African villages.

He told me that it

was wrong to discourage

or defame charitable giving,

that it helped regardless of the

larger context of globalization.

This is the essence of the

post-ideological, post-historical

mindset. He is saying

that we can operate independent of reality

because reality is beyond our control.

Regardless of the hypocrisy of Americans

offering advice on primary education,

I think he was wrong to exclude the

context along the lines of Oscar

Wilde's criticism of charity. He says,

the emotions of man

are stirred more quickly than man's

intelligence.

And as I pointed out some time ago in an

article on the function of criticism, it

is much more easy to have sympathy with

suffering than it is to have

sympathy with thought.

Accordingly,

with admirable though misdirected

intentions,

they very seriously

and very sentimentally set themselves to

the

task of remedying the evils that they see.

But their remedies do not cure the

disease. They merely prolong it.

Indeed, their remedies

are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty,

for instance, by keeping the poor

alive,

or in the case of a very advanced school,

by amusing

the poor.

But this is not a solution. It

is an aggravation of the

difficulty. The proper aim is to try

and reconstruct

society on such a basis

that poverty will be impossible.

And the altruistic virtues have really

prevented the carrying out of this aim.

Just as the worst slave owners

were those who were kind to their slaves

and so

prevented the horror of the system being

realized by those who suffered from it and

understood by those who contemplated it,

so in the present state of things in

England,

the people who do the most harm

are the people who try to do the

most good.

And at last we have had the spectacle of

men who have really studied the

problem and know the life,

educated men who live in the East End,

coming forward and imploring the community

to restrain its altruistic

impulses of charity, benevolence,

and the like.

They do so on the ground

that such charity degrades and

demoralizes. They're perfectly right.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It

is immoral to use private property in

order to alleviate the horrible evils

that result from the institutions of

private

property. It is both immoral and unfair.

That was Charles Schulz reading a piece.

Mostly Oscar Wilde, I think.

All right. Well, it was, I think,

a similar kind of view taken by Bernard

Shaw

in the play Major Barbara, which

was a depiction of the Salvation

Army,

and

had this same kind of

disgust with the paladin,

essentially, with those who, rather than

organizing or pursuing a political

solution to

poverty or

suffering, instead would go in

with their crosses and white shirts and

attempt to morally reform the poor and

essentially to treat them as if they were

diseased.

And so there is this kind of passive

aggression

certainly in these kinds of charity

where the charity appears to be

essentially gloating over the poor.

So the sadism of wealthy housewives

going into the ghetto

and hanging out with poor Irish immigrants

and

trying to stop them from drinking too much

alcohol and having

too much sex.

And so what is this charity, really?

And why is it that we do this? Why

is it that we have

starvation in places like Africa

that clearly resulted

from

the

The imperial, uh,

schemes of importation and

exportation,

uh,

but have no questioning of those schemes

today.

We live in a post-colonial world,

but our trade schemes are essentially, um,

intact. We still act like imperial,

um, enterprises that, that, you know,

so the State Department is essentially

an agent of US corporations that, that,

you know, goes in,

in whether into war or,

or within peace to promote those

interests.

And, and there's no questioning of, of,

of, uh, of free trade

or of globalization today.

Instead, there's just more palliative, uh,

organizations to go in and,

and prop up the dying,

uh,

but without any kind of critical

questioning of, of the cause.

So Johann, uh, this is, uh, you know,

this is the American

playground, I guess in some ways.

The mental playground of America is Africa

becau-

perhaps because it's a sort of inverted,

um,

paradise. You know, America, here we've

obliterated

the local, uh, native populations,

but we did it, uh, by

bringing Africans,

in part by bringing Africans here as

slaves,

uh,

and forcing them to do the dirty work

instead of, uh, using the natives

like the Spaniards did or the Portuguese.

Uh, and so this, uh,

we had this other approach, uh, in fact,

which,

which Christopher Britt wrote about in the

parable of the half-breed.

He read it in the last show.

It's also posted on local.org.

But essentially compares Robinson Crusoe

to Don Quixote,

these two different imperialists.

You know, Don Quixote coming, uh,

the Spaniard coming to, to

Christianize, uh, the, the Indians.

Um, but Don Quixote, uh,

in this sense being profoundly different

from

Robinson Crusoe,

the English Protestant who came

just to establish a commercial enterprise

and, uh,

exclusive of the natives. So Africa, it's,

it's like a guilt

complex maybe for America because America

treated the Africans so

badly here,

and Africans have become a part of the

civil society in

principle, but socially quite segregated.

I mean, apartheid in many ways is,

is preserves

culturally in America,

uh, in spite of the efforts of the,

of the government to, to integrate it.

And by comparison, you mentioned

that there are 11 languages in South

Africa,

um, that are official. In the US there,

uh, you know, it's

not like that. We're certainly the,

not speaking any native languages here.

You know,

the maybe consideration of Spanish

or Mandarin

Chinese, but certainly not Navajo.

Yeah.

Although I wanted to just interject one

quick thing that in spite of that fact, I

remember when we

were doing organizing in Oakland,

there was a graduate student

who'd done a study in a three square mile

area of the Fruitvale district

in which she found 80 different languages

spoken in, you know.

Other spoken, but it's just-

So yes-

... the difference between-

But what I'm trying to say is that-

Yeah

... nonetheless, there of, of course,

is a vast cultural heterogeneity that

still obviously exists in a sense.

It's just none of them are native.

Right.

It's, that's just globalization-

Yeah

... concentrated on one point. But-

And do all of them have input in your

economical decisions

and the, the writeup of your constitution?

I mean-

They're just sitting in shacks on the

reservation here.

I mean, there's,

the natives have essentially a

prophylactic

relationship [chuckles] with the American

people.

Yeah.

There's no contact.

No, no, look, this, the,

all of our topics today

was very intertwining,

and that brings you back to the lack of

history.

Most people don't understand this.

They don't know where they're coming from,

and they don't really understand what

they're part of.

I mean,

you're saying,

um,

Africa being petty grounds for the

Americans.

I mean, the English killed 26,000

women and children of Afrikaans descend in

concentration camps.

These are the Boers.

Yeah, these are the Boers. And, um,

I mean, we, we dealing with a

system today where we have,

and I repeat this again,

11 official languages. There,

there's a lot more, but there's 11 that

is part of the decision-making

that the constitution are published

in all these type of things. But, um,

we sitting with

a system

and the colonial part of it is, is

the traces of that is still so strong.

You can never get rid of this.

Not, not, not in 200 years.

Mm.

Um, as we,

everybody knows that this big word

apartheid is a massive thing,

and I think it is,

it is, it's still a modern day struggle,

not so much white on

Black or Black on white.

There's a lot of apartheid.

I mean, th-this is something, and,

and I just, uh,

checked this morning for the

date. In 1913, the English brought in the

Native Land Act, which

was not the first physical,

um, movement into apartheid, but that

was the

first documented one where they put this

act into

place. And South Africa only became

ruled by Afrikaans people in 1948.

So there were, th-this

was a already a deep ingrained system

that we

inherited from our colonial ancestors-

Mm

... and,

and we still dealing with it today.

As I said, you have a genetic imprint of

anger amongst young Black South Africans

because

of how their forefathers were treated.

They don't understand exactly why,

because they don't know history.

They're not taught this.

Mm.

They, they, they're not taught

that this was a English colonial, um,

uh,

rules and rules of engagement coming into

Africa.

But they see me as the modern young man

that did this to

them.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, but it's just things

that we deal with.

I, I, I think [sighs] the, the guys of my

generation are a bit more open-minded

about this whole thing.

And not only are you dealing with the

genetic imprint of anger

in young Black males, but also

Um, the same as the English and the Boers,

which we got similarities

here. We lost the empire.

Mm.

The Brits lost the empire.

They're angry on their little island out

there in

Europe.

Mm-hmm.

We all, we all angry here, and,

and then you got, because similar

to America now, you

are the most successful economy

this part of the world, so

are we the most successful economy in the

southern part of Africa or in Africa.

Mm.

So we have this anger,

this xenophobic anger.

We got six million Zimbabweans,

and not to talk about the rest

of Africa,

filtering into Southern Africa,

South Africa predominantly, um,

to come and share in our wealth and

if you were a North African

entrepreneur,

would you not have wanted to come into

South Africa and have your

try, same as what you got?

Mm.

And the same as the xenophobic anger

that the English youth is, is feeling.

I mean, Charles, um, myself

and Charles spent a bit of time in

England traveling throughout, and I, I,

I think we came to a consensus

about this, uh, young, uh,

angry mob of youth.

They,

they just were so xenophobically angry

that

you could feel it. The,

the loss of the empire is still so deeply

ingrained, and now they

are being penetrated by every country

that they

raped and pillaged in the colonial, uh,

um, era.

Yeah, they, they didn't get over it well,

and actually, I, I went to, I had to,

this is kind of silly, but I

was at a dinner party with some, uh,

sort of

well-to-do English people,

and they really hated the idea, I mean,

of, of, of, of America. They

were so humiliated by it.

And, uh, so I, I s-

I couldn't take it after a while,

so I said that, and this

is a sort of made up quote,

but it's not about the, the same people.

I said, uh,

"English politics reminds me of what, uh,

William Faulkner said

of E.M. Forster,

the nicest little old lady I ever met."

Um,

[chuckles] and so they,

they didn't like that very much.

But yeah, we, we did, and,

and they said pretty vicious things,

and they had their

own immigration problems that

were going on in, in England and, uh,

uh, you know, right through there

was a tremendous anger about it.

Yeah,

and there's clearly a lot of anger in the

United States.

I mean, so much that

in, uh, in the,

in the sort of Tea Party politics

of, of, of the Republican Party is,

is really nothing other

than that kind of, of, uh,

colonial resentment, you know,

or post-colonial resentment, the

feeling of loss, the feeling that, that,

you know, that America

is, is, is turning into a,

uh,

a non-white country.

There's all this press about it.

You know, the press loves to, to, to,

to run the headlines that, uh,

whites will no longer be the majority

and that the Hispanics are

rising and, uh,

and so there's this fear at the same

time that there's, you know,

it's been going on for decades,

the feeling anybody

that's, you know,

the Archie Bunker phenomenon.

I don't know if you know this TV show back

in the '70s, but every, every American

knows it. It's ridiculously popular,

and actually it was a great show because

it

depicted Archie Bunker, who was this

resentful, ignorant,

uh, uh, proletarian, you know, who, who,

who, who, uh, hated Blacks,

hated any- anybody who was a minority,

and sat around basically spewing

bad jokes and insults to every group that

imaginable. And c- and if

that for the American people

was cathartic because,

because we are taught in the p-

in the institutions, in the

public schools,

that you're not supposed to say these bad

words.

Of course, everybody knows every word,

and everyone's spewing them at

recess. But during class, if you,

if you say these words, they'll,

they'll, uh, inject you with, uh,

with antidepressants or something

and throw you in a closet.

And so there's a closeting, right,

of public opinion where,

where, uh,

where public meaning even in social

conversation, even at a party

with your friends,

you have to mute yourself, uh, and,

and censor yourself,

uh,

and so therefore develop this sort of

pressure chamber of, of, of

unspoken opinions and thoughts, uh,

which becomes, I

think, uh, essentially, you know, the,

the right, American right-winger.

And so, you know,

it's clearly a pattern here

that people feeling dispossessed of

their, of their colonial inheritance.

Yeah, and the, the, the,

the cross-border slander that,

that happens

all the time,

and I'm very glad to see

that we're not the

isolated case.

I mean, 'cause, uh, you got,

you got in South Africa now, um,

as you all know,

you got the African National Congress,

the ANC-

Uh-huh

... that is in power there, and

it's,

there's nothing new that's happening.

Keep the masses stupid

and corrupt the government from all its

tax

money. That's, that's what's happening,

and, and, and the things

are... I mean, they have their Mangwang,

um, meetings now,

which is passed, and

in there they, uh,

discuss several very important

matters that I, I've,

I've been kind of blessed to be

outside of cell phone radius and, and,

and, um, computer reception,

all these type of things.

So, but the, the two main things

that they were discussing there for us is,

um, the new land reform and, um, then

also the nationalization of mines,

which is like

a sentence that was on the lips of all

international investors

and all these type of things.

Um, 'cause I mean, in the end,

all this charity that we talk about

is, is that not to get a backhand of,

of the hand of diamonds or a bit of

oil?

Mm-hmm.

A glug of oil. [laughs] I mean, that,

that, that's all it's about.

So you, you got, you, you, you got, uh,

famine all over Africa.

You got not only American,

but international people coming

there making themselves feel better about

what them and their forefathers has done.

They come and work a little bit in a

hospital,

travel a little bit of South Africa and,

and, and then feel better about

themselves. But

the thing is that charity in itself

is a big sin 'cause, yeah, you're

helping a generation of people

that could not be sustained by the

land already into creating a second

generation that cannot

sustain itself. So the,

the, the, the answer is not charity.

The answer is education

and the basis thereof. I, I think that's,

that's my

opinion on that.

But I also meet a lot of young people,

extraordinary young people with different

agendas all over the African

continent in the medical, engineering,

all of these guys.

So I, I don't say all intentions is,

is bad, but I think,

I, I, I think these things, uh, yeah,

charity itself from

especially the USA

should be

much better

managed. Okay. I just wanna-- I was on a,

a

German friend of mine traveled around the

world in a Claus tractor.

He's, was, um,

uh,

getting money all over the world by doing

this charitable thing, and then

he donated it to Lesotho farmers,

farmers in Lesotho.

Lesotho is a small country in South

Africa, surrounded by South

Africa altogether. And, uh,

we had a conversation with

one of the farmers there, and

I called my friend to sit

and listen in 'cause we had obviously

different views

about this charitable act that he

was doing.

And, uh, I said, I said to the guy,

and can't remember his name now, but I

said, "So what do you think,

what do you think of this whole charity

act

and at this expensive ski resort where the

people are sitting there handing you

over this money?" And he said, "Well,

that's all good. That's a bonus.

But, um,

we don't really have to farm 'cause once a

year we get our

check from the USA, and, uh,

we can survive on that for another year."

Mm.

So that's why you don't see one

functioning farm in Lesotho.

Mm.

So it's more a curse than a help,

actually.

Yeah, that's, that's the,

the classic case.

It, that, that

to the extent that the desire to help

is, is,

lacks a,

a, a, a, a holistic perception of, of the,

of the

condition. It isn't just looking at, oh,

someone's starving, I will

go feed him, you know?

Mm.

But instead, why is he starving?

It's sort--

It's the obverse of the statement, you

know, if someone's starving,

don't give him a fish,

give him a fishing pole, right?

So what's the fishing pole? What, what,

what's,

what's the problem? And obviously,

the problem is the primary producer

economies,

they're growing coffee.

So, so countries that are starving

are growing coffee and bananas for

Westerners. And, and that can't go on.

Well-

And so to, to, so to the extent

that there's a failure to recognize

that that trade policy is causing

that person to starve,

that we therefore need to change trade

policy.

Now, this is a,

th- in America,

the most impossible thing to,

to challenge,

right? Even today, Charles, you

were talking about this new trade

agreement with

Asia,

uh, right?

Yeah. And it's, uh, uh,

with Southeast Asia primarily,

but it's essentially a

kind of, um, NAFTA on steroids that will,

uh,

uh, create the conditions in which, uh,

the international corporations that do

business, say, for instance, in Vietnam,

uh, or even here in America,

uh,

that are covered by the agreement would

not be, uh, subject to the courts

of those countries-

... uh, which, uh, is just-

Yeah

... startling.

Well, it is. I mean,

particularly after all that's happened,

you know, after all of

the, the financial crashes,

after all the gaming,

the disappearing of money, the

bailouts, the offshoring of, of, of, of,

of, of

resources in this country,

that it just goes on unabated.

There's, there's no emerging awareness,

structural

consciousness of, of

the, the, of the problem that's causing,

uh, whether it's someone

starving in Africa or, or so- or,

or the demolishing of

Detroit, that,

that there's no consciousness.

You can have all the suffering

and yet no consciousness.

Well, I think it,

there's an indulgence function, too.

I'm sorry,

and Julia Peters has got something good.

You know, it's,

it's as though we want to sort of buy an

indulgence for Detroit or

in the case of my little blog there,

East Palo Alto, and you buy your

indulgence by paying for someone somewhere

else to fix their society because you,

you don't wanna fix your own [laughs] .

I mean, we have the fair trade brand,

but what about some way of dealing with

this

problem which, which is political,

which is, uh,

which is aware of history, which...

and, and not just this disembodied, oh,

wringing of hands, uh,

all this sort of, I would say,

false sentimentality, all

of this fictitious concern?

Well, I think one, one, um,

I think really I, what I take

from a lot of this is, uh,

that the echoes of, of what we call, um,

you know,

democracy versus communism,

different forms of

economy, the power of the corporation,

the colonialist versus

the imperialist, is simply a,

a re-echoing over

and over and over again of, of control, of

power, and of money.

And if, you know, if a s- subjected,

uh, population,

a colonialized population takes over,

as we saw in many of the

African countries

and South American nations in the early

part, uh, years of

independence,

that those newly reconstituted independent

governments would often reach the same

levels of corruption, power, and, and, uh,

desire for control and for money.

And likewise, our globalized state is

really about controlling markets, and it--

our own state,

our own government, of course, uh,

very much, uh, sees itself as supporting

the power of corporations to freight,

to trade freely and to,

um, yeah, and to,

to keep making the money.

Well, thank you, everyone. This

is benlocal.org Radio Blog, um, and

with, uh, Julia Peters

and Elizabeth Barnett, uh, Johann Koetzie,

uh, Paul Fenn, and myself,

and we'll be back in two Mondays.

So thank you all for coming in.

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