E Wayne Ross – Page 142 – Critical Theories in Education

The Busheviks’ Great Leap Forward

Rugged Individualism.jpg
Lately I’ve been very much into poster graphics reading about and purchasing vintage 1960s-1970s Chinese communist propaganda posters (see CommunistPosters.com).

Taschen has recently published a beautiful large format book Chinese Propaganda Posters as well as a separate portfolio of posters selected from the book. The posters are from the collection of Michael Wolf and focus on the era of the Cultural Revolution.

I’ve also been inspired by my buddy Perry Marker to get into the vintage rock poster scene. I have just a few full size posters and a number of handbills, primarily psychedelic era graphics for concerts at the Filmore West in San Francisco and the Retinal Circus in Vancouver (including Muddy Waters
and Velvet Underground gigs).

So, how could I resist “The Busheviks’ Great Leap Forward”?

More on Katrina

Guy Dinmore’s report from NOLA for the Financial Times is a vivid description of the current conditions there, but it is also notable for a couple of other reasons. It is the first mention I’ve seen of the conditions in the eastern burb of Chalmette (outside of media in BC, which is covering the urban search and rescue teams from BC working in St. Bernard parish).

In addition, Dinmore’s article is the first I’ve read that uses the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 as a backdrop of analysis of the current situation.

Geraldine Lavy said her son protected four Australian tourists from rapists in the convention centre. “Can you imagine? Four white women on their own?”

And then she cursed her government, asking how the Australian embassy had been able to evacuate its citizens and she was still caught in hell, now separated from her son after being bussed to the airport.

Ms Lavy echoed the thoughts and words of many black Americans we spoke to over the weekend who, while often heroic or stoic in the face of the death and depravity around them, were deeply bitter and angry at the rich white people who run their country.

“They opened the levees to save the whole neighbourhood to protect their investments,” declared Larry Crawford, 34, believing, as many sincerely do, that some districts were deliberately flooded to relieve the pressure on the dykes protecting others.

Inconceivable today, yet this is what happened in 1927 with the great Mississippi flood that made a million people homeless. Not only that, as John Barry documents in his social history Rising Tide, black work gangs were held as virtual prisoners in squalid “concentration camps” while shoring up the levees to protect plantations. Many black Americans living in the north are descended from those who abandoned the Delta that year, after the landowners escaped the floods on a steamer to the music of “Bye, Bye Blackbird”.

This week almost nothing has been said in the news or by officials about the poor eastern suburb of Chalmette. Many of the houses – said by officials to number 27,000 – are totally under water. Here the death toll is thought to be greatest, possibly running well into the thousands, said police. Several hundred corpses are reported to have been gathered by locals in one school alone.

Senior officials, who have no bodies to count because there are no orders to collect any, say they have no idea how many people have died. One told a press conference on Saturday it could be one or two thousand.

How the media defines “looting”

Keep the “labor” in Labor Day

Mickey Z has a nice piece in MRZine remembering the “Lowell Mills Girls” and the movement for a ten-hour workday. Be sure to check the links.

“In vain do I try to soar in fancy and imagination above the dull reality around me but beyond the roof of the factory I cannot rise.” — anonymous Lowell Mill worker, 1826

Lowell, Massachusetts was named after the wealthy Lowell family. They owned numerous textile mills, which attracted the unmarried daughters of New England farmers. These young girls worked in the mills and lived in supervised dormitories. On average, a Lowell Mill Girl worked for three years before leaving to marry. Living and working together often forged a camaraderie that would later find an unexpected outlet.

What had the potential to become a relatively agreeable system for all involved was predictably exploited for mill owners’ gain. The young workers toiled under poor conditions for long hours only to return to dormitories that offered strict dress codes, lousy meals, and were ruled by matrons with an iron fist.In response, the Lowell mill workers — some as young as eleven — did something revolutionary: the tight-knit group of girls and women organized a union. They marched and demonstrated against a 15 percent cut in their wages and for better conditions . . . including the institution of a ten-hour workday. They started newspapers. They proclaimed: “Union is power.” They went on
strike.

As the movement spread through other Massachusetts mill towns, some 500 workers united to form the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) in 1844 . . . the first organization of American working women to bargain collectively for better conditions and higher pay. Sarah Bagley was named the LFLRA’s first president and she promptly led a petition-drive that forced the Massachusetts legislature to investigate conditions in the mills. Bagley not only fought to improve physical conditions, she argued that the female workers “lacked sufficient time to improve their minds,” something
she considered “essential for laborers in a republic.”

As with many revolutionary notions, the LFLRA met much opposition in their efforts. Despite their inability to secure the specific changes they demanded, the Lowell Mill Girls laid a foundation for female involvement and leadership in the soon-to-explode American labor movement and they continue to inspire those who stand against injustice today.

Mickey Z. is the author of several books including the soon-to-be-released There Is No Good War: The Myths of World War II (Vox Pop) and 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism (Disinformation Books). This essay was excerpted from 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know. He can be found on the Web at .
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Labor Day poses hard questions

MRZine: Labor day poses hard questions

It’s impossible to celebrate Labor Day 2005 without asking some hard questions: How organized is “organized” labor? How much of a movement is the labor “movement”? The last six weeks have torn away whatever shreds of clothing the emperor might have been wearing. We can deny the crisis no longer.

Labor Daybor

Here’s a Labor Day cartoon from the cultural absurdists at HomeStarRunner.com.

Check out the h*r wiki for everything you wanted to know (or not) about Strong Bad and the gang.

The evolving stories of ID and FSMism

Christian schools sue U of California

Inside Higher Ed reports that a group of Christian schools sued the University of California in federal court last week, charging that the university engages in religious discrimination by refusing to certify certain high school courses at religious schools that teach alternatives to evolution, including creationism and so-called “intelligent design.”

The lawyer for the Association of Christian Schools Internation, which is the group suing UC, told Inside Higher Ed he did not know what books are used in the schools whose courses are being rejected, the school that brought the issue to the Christian schools’ group’s attention is the Calvary Chapel Christian School, whose Web site says that it uses for its high school curriculum materials from such publishers as Abeka and Bob Jones University Press.

Abeka publishes science material that “presents the universe as the direct creation of God and refutes the man-made idea of evolution.”

Iowa State U profs reject claims that ID is science

After a professor at Iowa State University voiced support for “intelligent design” theories as an alternative to evolution, 120 professors signed a statement that they “reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor.” The ISU profs’ statement is a succinct description of how views regarding a supernatural creator are, by their very nature, claims of religious faith, and not within the scope or abilities of science, the hallmark of which is “methodological naturalism” or the view that natural phenomenon can be explained without reference to the supernatural.

ID a “hoax”

Tufts University prof Daniel C. Dennett’s “Show Me The Science” op-ed in The New York Times last week called intelligent design a “hoax.” Dennett rebuts many of the arguments put forward by its supporters, saying that in the end, there is no science of substance behind the challengers to evolution.

FSMism update

Pastafarianism makes The New York Times.

Evangelical scientists refute gravity with new “intelligent falling” theory

And finally, “America’s Finest News Source” reports on a new controversy over the science curriculum…the refutation of the gravity. (I think I blogged this a couple of weeks ago, but it’s worth a repeat.)