Guns

“Bang, bang. You’re dead,” we yelled,

Whooping and hollering, scampering

Among the trees, like cowboys on TV.

Shot dead we rolled in fallen leaves,

Arms and legs flopping, then bounced

Up to chase and shoot again and again

Till nightfall came, streetlights blinked,

And our mothers called us home.

Half a century now passed and kids

No longer play cowboys in the woods.

Dead children no longer rise up again

In classrooms, churches, and theaters,

Where real bullets fly all too often

And innocent blood stains the floor.

Toys no longer, guns are the death

Of culture, the demise of civility,

As love of power and of hate trump

Sense, and love of money, money

Negates our duty to the living

And the dead, and the dead to be.

There will be more death. We know.

We could change this future if—

If we had the will to stop pretending

Guns spell freedom with lethal rounds.

Guns write in death, and these cowboys

Cannot bounce up to yell “Bang, bang”

And hear their mothers call them in.

Guns send them home alone, forever.

I wrote this poem in response to the latest mass shooting, which occurred in Oregon. In the previous post I discussed our American obsession with guns and the gun violence that comes from our collective inability to address resulting death and injury not as a threat to a supposed constitutional right but as a threat to the common good that is foundational in our democracy. Sensible gun laws, which are not universal in the United States but could, and should, be, are merely an essential starting point. However, such laws would lay a foundation for changing our pervasive gun culture and making our nation safer for all.

Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/

Verging on Darkness

Recently I read a couple of Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death novels, which are set in the late 12th century during the reign of England’s Henry II, who is best, if unfairly, remembered for the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, his “meddlesome” Archbishop of Canterbury. King Henry is less remembered for his more important accomplishments, including the modernization, for the 1100s, of England’s medieval justice system. For example, he instituted jury trials to replace trial by combat at a time when, on the European continent, trial by inquisition and torture were still the norm.

It should be remembered that the 12th century marked England’s emergence from the darkest of the Dark Ages into what is commonly called the High Middle Ages (11th to 13th centuries) and thus two to three centuries before the Renaissance, the acknowledged rebirth of classical learning and precursor to the modern ascendancy of rationality over superstition leading to the next period, the Enlightenment. In the 1170s, when Franklin set her first novel, the Enlightenment was a long way ahead and even the rudiments of science were at war with medieval superstition and primitive religiosity.

As I read Franklin’s interesting, well-research tales, I was struck by the similarities of that period to our own. American democracy was born in the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, a period that reached its height in the 1700s. America’s founding generation—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—were all products of the Enlightenment and so infused our fledgling democracy in the 1770s with ideals and principles grounded in humanism and scientific reason.

We should not mistake today’s radical “conservatives” as desiring to conserve this foundation. Indeed, the conservative party in modern American politics has all but disappeared because it has been co-opted in large measure by a radically reactionary faction that seeks not to turn back the clock to America’s democratic roots but, rather, to take this nation back, both figuratively and literally, to the Dark Ages, to superstition and errant, simpleminded religiosity.

Adherents of this reactionary, proto-fascist (to use a term I learned first from Henry Giroux) worldview espouse Christianist ideology to lure the unsuspecting and the uncritical in the same manner that radical Islamists lure the unsuspecting to their reactionary cause. Recall George W. Bush’s application of the laden word crusade to the Iraq War before his handlers and propagandists hushed it up. Neither -ist ideology resembles Christianity nor Islam in any true religious sense; they are political ideologies cloaked in religious garb. Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann offer prime examples of this faction’s proponents.

Similarly, political ideologues of this ilk are not trying to restore, but to destroy, American democracy by advocating a return not to the Enlightenment principles of our founding era but to the medievalism that preceded it by several centuries. Rick Perry’s recent statements about the need to rewrite our Constitution are examples of this movement.

Today’s cultural and political struggles between democratic reason and superstitious radicalism in the United States bear uncanny similarity to those that marked 12th century England. If thinking men and women are not informed and proactive on behalf of enlightened American democracy, we will be dragged into an American Dark Ages, a prospect that is not as remote as many might like to believe.