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Election 2020 journal

October 12, 202

I’m not much of a day counter. In Baghdad we had the Baghdad Donut, a circular calendar that counted down the days from arrival to departure a year later. I lost track and overstayed by about a week. But fact is, we in the US have a very consequential election in less that a month, and I hope to mark the time to Election Day with these blog posts.

I am still a docent at the Library of Congress, though we haven’t actually done tours since the COVID lockdown in March. There is an interesting set of murals by Elihu Vedder, five in all, that highlight various aspects of the significance, importance, integrity and sanctity of the ballot and the voting process. I’ll not include all five here, but one is especially pertinent. These murals are strategically positioned in the foyer to what used to be the entrance to the main reading room to remind legislators of their responsibilities to the body politic.

Elihu Vedder mural. Library of Congress.

The mural shows, on the right, a youth dropping his ballot into a voting urn on his way to school, enshrining the direct voting process as an essential part of the American system of governance. On the left, a young woman winnows wheat above the voting urn, a metaphor to the voting process that separates the wheat from the chaff, or good candidates from bad ones.

OK. enough for the tour guide urge in me.

These blog posts are not going to be long, it I can help it.

Simultaneously, I am glued to the C-SPAN coverage of the Supreme Court Justice nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. It’s an understatement to say the Democrats are not happy about this nomination confirmation hearing just weeks before the election. I am not a saint to their devotion. I wish Amy Coney Barrett fair winds and following seas in the confirmation process. At the end of the day, she will be confirmed.

And, at the end of the day, I will go out on a limb and predict, President Trump will be elected to a second term. That is not necessarily a partisan statement. I think it is a logical one. 

Finally, Happy Columbus Day! Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! And be of good cheer. We will get through all this.

October 14, 2020

Well, we are two days closer, two days closer to Armageddon the way some folks tell it. The confirmation questioning ends tonight. Tomorrow the committee deliberates, the committee vote will likely be delayed for a week, next week it goes out of committee, and the week of October the 26th the vote hits the complete floor and boom, confirmation of the newest Supreme Court Justice. Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She clearly has a superior intellect, superior at least to the folks questioning her on the committee. And on a personal level I love her large Catholic family and the fact that she is Catholic. If you have been listening you already know I am going through a bit of a late-in-life conversion to Catholicism, just like many of my heroes in life. Blame Catholic education.

I also want to say a word in this post about how competitive this job market is. I left a decent job at Howard, at least pandemic furlough proof, for a short term gig as a contractor. And now, two months into the contract, I find myself bombarded with offers and work opportunities. And that’s not to say that it is only a seller’s market. Two universities in this vicinity are cranking out dozens of librarians and archivists every semester, which also makes it a buyer’s market. So what happens when you have a perfectly competitive seller’s (of labor) market AND a perfectly competitive buyer’s (of labor) market? The first answer is wage and price equilibrium. But what actually happens is an interesting market segmentation, in fact, a market segregation, where those few sellers of labor possessing other assets, like additional degrees, certifications, project management experience, (and sometimes race, age, or sex preferences of the buyers) face a different and more favorable set of market forces. I think they used to call it labor market segmentation, a useful euphemism. Two interviews this week. We’ll see how it goes. (Note: I always thought when I retired I would do the easy thing and continue with State as a a retired annuitant. The path I took of actually acquiring new skills and taking them to the market has been much more fun and fulfilling but I do miss the travel.)

A ton of anti-Biden propaganda/information hit the streets last night. There is actually a photo of his son, Hunter, asleep with a crack pipe hanging from his lips. Old allegations of rape are re-surfacing accompanying the publishing of a book by his accuser (whom I believe). And there are reports of misdoings regarding the Obama/Biden stewardship of the Benghazi mess, which I trust and know to be closer to accurate than otherwise. Otherwise, the phantom Biden leads in various polls are shrinking like cheap cotton. Look, I never trusted those polls and I remember how off they were in 2016. Why should they be different in 2020? Same biased media, same biased pollsters. 

Meanwhile, the market keeps chugging along. Advances are leading declines in all my categories. The TSP balance keeps heading North to the Promised Land. I am halfway through The Good Lord Bird, those chapters where John Brown meets Frederick Douglass in Rochester and Harriet Tubman, referred to by Brown affectionately as “the General” at a meeting in Canada. Wow, can’t wait to see what Showtime does with that one! And just received Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, right on time to take a deep dive before Saturday’s poetry group meeting. 

Finally, I am quite torn regarding the South Carolina Senate race. On the one hand, it would be so symbolic for South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, to be represented by two black senators! So symbolic! I would be thrilled to see Scott take Harrison under his wing and show him the ropes. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to see the Republicans lose leadership of the Senate, and a loss by Lindsey Graham would be an inestimable loss of knowledge in and by the Senate body politic. I am torn. 

Retweeting this: Election Interference? Facebook and Twitter Suppressing New York Post Bombshell Story Of Damaging Hunter Biden Emails https://americantruthtoday.com/politics/2020/10/14/election-interference-facebook-and-twitter-suppressing-new-york-post-bombshell-story-of-damaging-hunter-biden-emails/?utm_source=sprklst&utm_campaign=americantruth-election-10_14-mid#.X4dsq1oGuDo.twitter

https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden-tried-to-cash-in-big-with-chinese-firm/

postscript. My poetry blog is exploding, thanks to a retweet by a friendly journalist. It is a poem a clef, a sonnet based on an IM received from a friend calling me out on my Facebook posts. Check it out: https://thisismypoetryblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/11/on-sunday-morning-full-measure-is-better-than-meet-the-press-a-sonnet/

October 16, 2020

No particular theme today, just rambling and musing.

It is the 161st anniversary of the Harper’s Ferry Raid by Osawatomie John Brown, the noted and still in some quarters infamous American abolitionist. I don’t remember if it was because of the way I heard his story the first time, or what, but growing up John Brown was one of my heroes. Then, when, in my twenties I read W.E.B. DuBois’ very detailed biography, the image and the thought of that bearded radical were forever cemented in my mind. At some point along the way I stumbled across this Herman Melville poem (I know the reader may be surprised because Melville was not known for poems, but he did write some), The Portent.

Hanging from the beam,
      Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
      Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
      (Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap
      Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
      Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
      (Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.

We may come back to this subject. “The dogma lives loudly within me.” 

I missed last night’s dueling town halls. Other fish to fry. Today the pundits are weighing in. The consensus seems to be that Biden got softballs pitched to him while Trump, to extend the pitching metaphor, got inside curves and fastballs. No surprises there. But it is pretty incredible that Biden was not pressed on any of the leading news story of the week, Hunter Biden’s laptop, emails, photographs, videos, and documented evidence of pay-for-play shenanigans straight from the Hillary Clinton playbook. An earlier video is proving to be eerily accurate and this evidence would be both damning and disqualifying under any set of normal circumstances. We shall soon see how far we have fallen.

A professor I was/am fond of working with called and asked me to help her prepare a presentation on the intersection of archives, libraries and race. I am intentionally not a “race” man; I see race for what it is, a social construct for perpetuating division. But I will enthusiastically help her with the hope that a good presentation will result and perhaps spin itself off into a paper or a series of presentations. 

Speaking of race, the black Woodberry Forest alums met on Zoom last night along with the current headmaster. Woodberry Forest was/is the Virginia prep school I helped to integrate back in 1970 – 1972, the years inclusive of my attendance. Although fifty years ago, the place continues to occupy a prominent place in my psyche, as evidenced in blog posts here and here. You know how impressionable one can be at 14 and 15. Well, it (the school) was and continues to be a world onto itself in so many ways, a safe and secure microcosm of a world to come, a heterotopia of sorts.

Big weekend coming up. Poetry group and Octavia Butler group are filling up Saturday and independent study Sunday. Good times! 

October 18, 2020

I am just about ready to swear off social media. Twitter censors you whenever they feel like it, and while I have had no censorship issues with Facebook, we really can’t be sure how Facebook may be monetizing data and information on their users. Further, Facebook “friends” cannot defend their political position without attacking yours, then have no qualms about attacking your person if they disagree with your politics. It’s the new level of civility. OK, swearing off may be extreme, and I am very likely going to try to tweet up to and including November 3rd.

Got up this morning at the crack of dawn, put on some coffee, and set a goal to finish reading The Good Lord Bird, a historical novel and soon to be a series on Showtime by James McBride. Late in the story there is a second appearance by Frederick Douglass that is not at all flattering (his first appearance was equally unflattering), a passing chance meeting with abolitionist Martin Delaney, and a short appearance at the end by Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee at the siege of Harper’s Ferry. In an interesting technique of novel writing, the chapters towards the end get shorter and shorter, in effect compressing time itself, drawing the reader through the ending events and to the conclusion that we already know and yet, the reader is kept on the edge of his seat until the very end. 

The cool thing about reading fiction, even historical fiction, is getting the opportunity to engage in that time-bending process. I’d be interested in knowing what research has been done on how the brain influences and is influenced by the reading process. And along those lines, how about reading poetry? And plays? Does the actual mental process vary?

Speaking of “actual mental process,” my iMac is slowing way down. It’s going on six years old, and that is six hard years, a 2013 model I bought at the Apple Store at Friendly Center in Greensboro, NC over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014 and transported to Cullowhee, NC where I placed it in service. I love it more than a man should love a machine, and being basically a monogamous kind of guy, when this machine dies I will get an updated version of the exact same machine. 

OK. No political commentary today. There is plenty to comment on, but it all tires me. Plus, everybody know where I stand. And there is tomorrow. 

Meanwhile how about a poem! Bob Kaufman, a beat poet from New Orleans, took a Buddhist vow of silence after learning of the JFK assassination. He ended his period of silence when the Vietnam War ended in 1973 with this poem. 

All Those Ships That Never Sailed

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls…
Today I bring them back
Huge and transitory
And let them sail
Forever.

All those flowers that you never grew-
that you wanted to grow
The ones that were plowed under
ground in the mud-
Today I bring them back
And let you grow them
Forever.

All those wars and truces
Dancing down these years-
All in three flag swept days
Rejected meaning of God-

My body once covered with beauty
Is now a museum of betrayal.
This part remembered because of that one’s touch
This part remembered for that one’s kiss-
Today I bring it back
And let you live forever.

I breath a breathless I love you
And move you
Forever.

Remove the snake from Moses’ arm…
And someday the Jewish queen will dance
Down the street with the dogs
And make every Jew
Her lover.

October 20, 2020

Why don’t we start off real slow? You all know I finished the James McBride book, The Good Lord Bird, this past weekend. And you know from my previous posts that it was a fictional account of John Brown’s incident at Harpers Ferry. Of course, that’s an understatement. But it has a direct bearing on what I want to say today about the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings. We’ll get to that.

What I haven’t mentioned about The Good Lord Bird is a subtle little subplot that continuously breaks the surface of consciousness in the flow of the narrative, but in an unobtrusive way. The narrator of the story throughout is John Brown’s adoptee, whom he calls Onion. John Brown would have us believe Onion is a little girl he orphaned in a shootout with her slavemaster in which her father was killed by a stray bullet. But Onion is not a girl. He is Henry Shackelford, a 12 year-old boy, but he goes along with the deception, initially because he sees Brown as his new master, and, you know, you give white people what they want. As the plot thickens, Onion enters puberty, and while he wears a dress and a bonnet and accepts all the privileges of girlhood, he pretty much constantly struggles with the deception. Eventually, he falls head-over-his-heels in love with one of Brown’s daughters and reveals his secret to her as they part.

Meanwhile, every time Onion is in the company of black people, slave or free, they see right through the ploy, and go along with it, all except Frederick Douglass, who appears to have a small thing for prepubescent girls when slightly inebriated. But I’ll leave that story for your enjoyment when you read the book. Spoiler alert: Onion doesn’t die in the end.

Ok. Let’s put it in historical context. The subject is the Supreme Court case, Brown v Board of Education. ACB rightfully described Brown v Board as a super-precedent, a decision so overwhelmingly correct that it will never be overturned. OK. So Democratic senators tried to make a case that Roe v. Wade was similarly a super-precedent, to back ACB into a corner. Well, I ask, in no uncertain terms, how the fuck is there a similarity between Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade?

Brown overturned a century of badly decided law. Yes, sometimes the Supremes get it wrong. Mind you, I am not a lawyer, nor have I ever spent a day in law school. President Frederick Humphries, when he addressed our honor society at FAMU in the mid-1980’s, mentioned three cases that all blacks should know. I made it my personal duty to get smart on those three cases.

Dred Scott made the determination that blacks, enslaved or free, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The dissenter in the case, Justice Benjamin Curtis, at the time the only member of the Court with formal legal training, actually resigned his seat on the Court out of principled protest regarding the decision. The only one ever to resign a seat on the Court in protest over a decision. 

Later, Plessy v Ferguson, also wrongly decided on several legal grounds, enshrined both a caste system and a type of racial apartheid that was legally enforceable throughout the country for the next 70 years, give or take. 

As an aside, the Chief Justice on Dred Scott who died at the end of Lincoln’s first term while Senate was out of session, Roger Taney, was replaced on the very day that Senate came back into session. No, President Lincoln did not “wait and do the right thing” as claimed wrongly by Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, et.al. Senate was out of session for the election, and back in their states, and as soon as the senate reconvened, that very day, the antislavery attorney Salmon Chase was confirmed to the seat and appointed by Lincoln as Chief Justice.

Brown v Board overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and in some ways sought to remedy the Dred Scott decision, both wrongly decided by all accounts, and both of which had plagued this country for several decades if not centuries.

I know Roe is important. But Roe doesn’t overcome a provision in law that was universally applied to all citizens. Not even for all women, since not all women are seekers of the relief it grants. I have read accounts in the archives at Howard University of how medical doctors on the staff of their renown medical school were arrested, charged, and convicted for performing abortions in their off time in the 1950’s (though the biggest stink was only when they were caught performing abortions on young white girls, but that is another issue altogether). I have read about back alley abortions pre-Roe and how Roe made them unnecessary (even though they still continued). I am also aware of the number of black babies who have been killed since Roe was decided in 1973 but I won’t mention that here. Check out CDC figures at my August Wilson blog when, in King Hedley II, the wife of the protagonist was hellbent on aborting her baby. Also, Roe doesn’t overturn law that had been enshrined in the Constitution for decades. In fact, the Constitution never mentions abortion. Brown and Roe are not equal, not equivalent, not congruent, not even remotely similar on any grounds.

OK. That was a mouth full that it will likely get me in trouble. Good trouble. Come back and read this again later after I’ve had the chance to put in hyperlinks if you are one of the early birds.

Please feel free to comment in the comment box below. I’ll be watching. 

October 22, 2020

Short post today. Let’s start with a human interest story. I turn 65 next month. We are getting phone calls, emails, mailings, you name it, about Medicare and Medigap plans I should buy from all over. Some are high – pressured. They are the worst. Some are smooth as silk. Watch out for them particularly. 

Spouse of a childhood friend passed away from COVID19. My first direct experience with death from the pandemic. It’s real.

Atlanta Fed predicts 35% growth in GDP for the third quarter. Good news. A guy I knew many moons ago at Stanford runs that operation. Smart guy. Good guy.

Les Payne’s book, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, completed by his daughter, Tamara Payne, after his untimely passing hit my mailbox this morning. The Guardian review from a couple days ago ain’t too shabby. I am putting every other book on my reading list on hold and moving it up to the top of the list. In my teenage years I read and loved The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Read it twice, once in the summer before 7th grade and again in Mrs. Coley’s Black Literature class in high school. Still, most of it I wouldn’t fully understand until years later. Ultimately, while still a teenager, I acted on that reading, somewhat to the dismay of family members and childhood friends at the time. It’s a pattern I would continue throughout my life, reading, then acting on what I read. For what it’s worth, I have no regrets.

President Trump held a rally in North Carolina Wednesday night.. Gastonia. I try to catch all the NC rallies. Greensboro actually got a couple of shout outs. “Esse quam videri,” the NC state motto, is a Latin phrase from Cicero’s essay “On Friendship,” meaning “To be, rather than to seem.” There’s no place like home. There is no place like home. Keep saying it. 

Michael Goodwin’s opinion piece in today’s New York Post, along with the attached letter from former Hunter Biden business partner and my shipmate Tony Bobulinski is damning and disturbing. Not sure how the Biden camp can survive it. As my former mentor, uniquely qualified as a physician and a politician used to say, “Politics is a contact sport. If you can’t stand the sight of blood stay out of it.” This Frontpage piece by Daniel Greenfield is also a real humdinger. 

The day is young. In fact, it’s a brand new day. There may be addendums (addenda?) to this post before the day is over. Especially with the final Presidential Election debate scheduled for tonight. 

October 24, 2020

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

You’ve already heard enough about the final debate, so I won’t beat that dead horse. But I do have one unanswered question. VP Biden said in the debate that we were heading for a dark winter. He said it twice, as if he had rehearsed it, as if he really wanted us to get it. Anybody heard the term before, “Dark Winter?

I have. Operation Dark Winter was a bio-terrorism war game performed/conducted over two days in June 2001. Senior level military and foreign policy practitioners participated with limited overseas involvement. Closely held at the time, it was OBE’d (overcome by events) with the 9-11 attacks later the same year. Joe Biden remembered it, and pulled it out in the debate. But was it appropriate? Or was it just a cheap shot at subliminal fear mongering?

Some of my friends “in the business” will publicly accuse me of conspiracy thinking. But they know.

One more thing and I am going to let it go. Listening to the pundits in the aftermath of the final debate, more and more are focusing on the leveraging influence of the black vote. 10 to 15 percent of the electorate can certainly swing a vote on the national level and particularly in the so-called battleground states. If Biden wins, black women will get the credit with very little payback. If Biden loses, black men will be blamed for blexiting to Trump.

Hillary was able to capture the woman vote in ways that Biden will have to struggle to achieve, especially with his “handsy” reputation among women. Hunter Biden’s laptop issue, along with the “crime family” shenanigans may not shift any voters, but it may cause some voters to not bother and the not-botherers may turn out to be critical in ways none of the pundits have acknowledged. Either way, the real analysis on the Hunter-effect won’t emerge until well after the election, for better or worse.

Our poetry group met today. We began with a poem by one of our group members, entitled October 2020. In addition to Louise Gluck and Ted Kooster, I submitted a Bob Kaufman poem and one of mine inspired by Kaufman, which I was both thrilled and honored to read. Nonetheless, I’m learning that the poetry group actually has a low tolerance for thought diversity. Not everybody, just a very vocal few. That’s unfortunate, because it means we have to tip-toe around everyday subjects that some of the extra-sensitive folks might find objectionable. C’est la vie. You choose your poison. Still, I like it and will continue to participate.

postscript. We will go to the voting station at Judiciary Square to vote early next week. But we won’t be wearing any hats or gear to give away our preference out of fear of physical harm. Such is the reality of 2020 in the nation’s capital. More Monday. 

October 26, 2020

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

Every-other-day comes around so quickly. And there is so much in the news environment. And so little, actually. Today I have a reflection from my teen-age years somewhat pertinent to today.

Let’s go back in time. Way back. 1972. Mrs. Proctor’s US Today class, a social studies elective focused on current events at Dudley Sr. High. Why I was back home for my junior year is a whole different subject that you’ll have to read about in my memoir to fully fathom. Dudley and the rest of Greensboro were under court-ordered busing to achieve a racial balance of 70% white and 30% black in every high school, even though it had been historically Greensboro’s black high school. My grand uncle, Ernest Rankin, known around black Greensboro as Ice Man, brought my father and his sister from Browns Summit to live with him to attend high school. Also another story, but let’s not digress. Nixon’s re-election campaign was in full swing even though the Watergate break-in was out there and everybody knew Nixon was guilty as sin. (This is history, y’all!) 

In Mrs. Proctor’s class, every day’s discussion ended up being about Nixon and busing and race. About half the class, the white half, anxiously and whole-heartedly supported Nixon. I’d look at them and just shake my head. I mean, Watergate? Really? in the best case, the most they could come up with was “He’s not a bad guy. It’s those plumbers that went rogue on him.” 16-year old me was like, “Come on, y’all, the guy’s a crook. Stevie Wonder can see that!” 

But for them it was all about race, about riding that bus, about being in that black school. Some of y’all remember. Me, I walked to school, less than a block away after crossing through the PT field and Bluford’s campus. Our neighborhood was called Dudley Heights! And my father was a Dudley alum, Class of ’31, Dudley’s first graduating class, so I fully belonged there. But I digress again. The point is, fueled by whatever, these kids were supporting Nixon no matter what, because for them it was about something else altogether. 

Are y’all hearing me?

So in the end, Nixon was re-elected. I can’t even remember the Democrat’s name but I believe it was nearly a clean sweep in the Electoral College. Let me look it up. Yep. Clean sweep. Nixon won every state except Massachusetts, the only state McGovern carried (and that wasn’t even his home state!). 

The rest is pretty much history. They voted Nixon in anyway, overwhelmingly, and in clear view of all his crookedness, as least as far as I could see. The Watergate hearings happened the following summer, 1973, and we watched it every day at Governor’s School. Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned the following year and I don’t remember the exact reason why. He selected a member of Congress, Gerald Ford, as VP. The following year, 1974, following impeachment but short of actual removal from office, Nixon himself resigned, in disgrace, and spared the country the pain of a bipartisan removal from office and reversal of a near unanimous Electoral College victory.

Now, don’t get twisted about the party labels. Nixon was a Republican. This year the clearly evident crook is the former VP, a Democrat. I’ll not go into any of the gory details here because it’s just too yucky and some things, once you see them, cannot be unseen. Yet folks are backing him anyway because again, it’s not about what it appears to be on the surface. 

I don’t know how this tale ends, but either way, the winner will be my President. I will salute smartly and carry on. That’s what patriots do. And I am a patriot. Nor will I bitch and moan and groan like some many did after the 2016 election and for the next four years.

OK, that’s it. Y’all still with me?

Hold on to the blog post, because where history may not repeat itself, so it is said, it certainly rhymes. And this history is poetry, epic poetry no less. 

Postscript. The polls open tomorrow in Washington, DC for early voting. We will cast our ballot early Wednesday assuming that lines will be long tomorrow. Trump got 4% of the black vote in DC in 2016. The latest prediction is that he will get slightly over 9% of the DC black vote this year. That’s double. Hillary got 91% of the black vote in 2016. Latest predictions are Biden will get 88%, a 4 point drop. When we have the final tallies we will add a second postscript to this post. MAGA! 

October 28, 2020

Six days and a wake-up, they would say in the Navy. Six days to perhaps the most consequential election in U.S. history. Lucky us – right place, right time. 

Riots in downtown DC last night by BLM and Antifa crowds mimicked simultaneous rioting in Philadelphia following a visit by the infamous community organizer. If the polls are correct and Biden is so far ahead in Pennsylvania, why is Antifa and BLM acting up and leading riots in Philadelphia?  None of this makes any sense to me. 

The Bobulinski interview (link to transcript, videos removed) on Tucker Carlson last night got the highest rating (no. of viewers) of any cable TV program in history

We voted this morning at School Without Walls Francis-Stevens. Got in the mood early by listening to the Malcolm X speech, The Ballot or the Bullet. Just coincidentally, Francis-Stevens is named for Thaddeus Stevens, abolitionist and member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, and Dr. John Francis, medical professor at Howard U medical school and Freedmans’ Hospital. There were no lines and we were in and out within minutes. So much for the long lines theory.  Links will be added later.

Two important speeches occurred since the last post. Monday Archbishop Vigano spoke by video to the annual Catholic Identity Conference in Pittsburgh on Pope Francis and the deep church. Enlightening, inspiring and revealing talk. Vigano calls our attention and our contemplation to the struggle between the classical, the traditional, and elements of modernity in our religious and cultural life and how that tension, or the results of it, seeps into our political conversation. He is one of the world’s great thinkers on the scene today. 

Then, in a special report from DOJ about the arrest of Communist Chinese agents in the US harassing American citizens, FBI Director Chris Wray actually said words to the effect that the CCP was seeking world domination, not just regional hegemony per traditional textbook international relations doctrine. Quite a dramatic departure, though very low keyed and almost under the radar mast except for those in the know. In both aforementioned cases, important historical milestones were reached.

Had a nice social media reunion with some old shipmates from my “tin can” days. Friendships forged in hard work and dedication are not soon forgotten. N o thing like being connected by a common effort , a deep love, and a great enthusiasm. Joining th e Navy was a good thing in life. 

I was getting ready for a work call, drinking coffee, when a stray motion of my hand sent coffee everywhere, including on top of my keyboard. Keyboards don’t like coffee. I think it may be lost. At a minimum, the space bar does not work. There is no moving forward without a space bar. I’ll get a cheap replacement to tide me over, but ultimately I’m gonna have to fork out the cash and get an official Apple replacement.

Ended the day with a Zoom meeting with FAMU alumni in the DC area. Another nice social media reunion. 

How about some music? 

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October 30, 2020

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

Big news on the literary scene! Pitt has acquired August Wilson’s papers! 450 boxes of pure gold. As an archivist it makes my heart sing, but as an August Wilson scholar it is a dream come true. Scholarship had reached some limits and demand for his papers was high. Here are a few links: 

https://www.playbill.com/article/august-wilsons-archives-to-be-housed-in-pittsburgh-playwrights-hometown

https://triblive.com/aande/museums/pitt-library-system-acquires-august-wilson-archive/

https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/theater-dance/2020/10/29/August-Wilson-University-of-Pittsburgh-buys-literary-archive-Pittsburgh-Cycle-Pulitzer/stories/202010280135

One more day in October. So perhaps one more day for the springing of an October surprise. I have had enough surprises for one election cycle so I’m good. What I need is more poetry but what I don’t need is more smug intolerance from the literati elite. I enjoy the being with the congregation, yet everything in life has its limits.

The top news of the week was University of Pittsburgh landing the August Wilson archives. Sorry, Hunter Biden’s laptop came in a distant second. I immediately cranked out an email to the Pitt special collections guy to see if they were taking volunteers. I’d love to spend a couple of weeks helping out with the processing effort, even on my own dime. The answer was short and sweet. No volunteers during the pandemic. The scourge of our time wins again. Broke my heart. I’ll try again in January. 

Things are pretty calm in the nation’s capital. BLM and Antifa have stopped their night rioting in DC for the time being. Perhaps the National Guard presence in Philadelphia has had a bit of a chilling effect. One can only hope. 

Busy day at work and I have plumb run out of gas. I stayed up late last night to catch a west coast Bob Kaufman tribute but the transmission was not quite up to snuff and it was already late because of the time difference and I fell asleep. Sorry Bob. To make up for it, here is my favorite Bob Kaufman poem, Believe, Believe. 

Believe, Believe

By Bob Kaufman 

Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society’s garments.

Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.

Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time.

p.s. Happy birthday, Ezra Pound!

October 31, 2020 – Special Halloween edition! Boo Hoo!

Posted on October 31, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

It is Halloween, or All Hallows Eve depending on your persuasion, the day preceding All Saints’ Day. The Feast of All Saints celebrates the lives of all the saints, known and unknown. I just looked it up. Funny they don’t call it the Feast of All Other Saints, those who don’t have their own holy days. Not everybody gets to be a saint, I guess. But everybody gets a shot at this thing called life, from Ernest Holmes to the Artist formerly known as Prince. So let’s celebrate it!

I woke up to the news that yet another Hunter Biden laptop has emerged. Wow, that guy never would have made it in the Navy, not to mention in the Foreign Service with that level of carelessness. Speaking of which, well maybe not, some of you all might remember that time a news reporter asked George H.W. Bush how much a gallon of milk costs. He didn’t know, of course, and why would he, he was the VPOTUS. But the other day I heard President Trump mention that gas was down to $2.00 a gallon, and sure enough, I was out today and gas was selling for $1.95. I asked my wife, “how did he know that?” She said, “his people told him.” And my response to that was,”Why didn’t GHWBush have his people tell him about the price of milk?” Well, as they said back then, “It’s the economy, stupid!” And by the way, the Archbishop Vigano open letter to President Trump warrants your careful examination.

Set your clocks back one hour tonight. Daylight Saving Time. 

OK, final thoughts on the election:

Trick or Treat! 

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November 1, 2020

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

OK, back on cycle after a one-off special edition for Halloween. Every other day for the duration of November, which also coincides with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Last year for NaNoWriMo I penned a short play, Seminar, which is in hiding on my Google drive, though I have been thinking about breaking it out, dusting it off, and giving it some finishing touches this November after the election is finalized. I’ll also see if I can link to it in this blog post. By the way, the play’s full title is Seminar, or, Enough Blame to Go Around: Corruption in the Capital in Late Empire. I’ll see if I can link to it. 

Before I get too carried away (and I have a lot to say to you all today), since it is Sunday, let’s pause for a set of Bible verses from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: 

Y’all may remember I visited Ephesus back in the day on a NATO Mediterranean deployment with port visits in Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, and Israel. By the time we got to Turkey I was a total salty dog and we had a good time. In Ephesus we went on a walking tour and saw all the ancient Roman remains. Going to a place always gives reading about the place extra meaning. 

Back to the subject, I am reading Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? Goodreads has some good reviews. It’s my second Allison book, the first being Essence of Decision, a treatise on the Cuban Missile Crisis that we studied in an MA program I did at the University of London. Suffice it to say Graham Allison knows his stuff.

It helps to understand the title. Thucydides wrote 2000 years ago a history about a big crisis in his known world, the Peloponnesian Wars. Lucky me, I had a teacher named Wilfred T. Grenfell to give me the full back story when I was a strapping 9th grader. 

Athens and Sparta had been allies and best buddies for many years. Sparta was the preeminent military power, but Athens had everything else: rich culture, stable government, and imperial ambitions. As Athens grew stronger, Sparta became very wary. It is somewhat of an oversimplification to say that a series of seemingly unrelated events led to war between the then two super-powers. The progression to that war took on its own power and identity and came to be called the Thucydides Trap, when two related powers, on track to fulfilling their separate visions of hegemony, found themselves creating the conditions for an inevitable slide to war with each other.

Now, what, one may ask, does that have to do with here and now? 

In coursework I did at both the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies and later at the Army War College, the doctrine (and the dogma) was that the China rise was nothing to be concerned about as the Chinese government only sought regional hegemony, i.e., control over and development of their own geographical area, and that their ambitions would not encroach on our own. Just give them their space. One could easily assert and even conclude that Joe Biden bought and buys into that dogma. Let’s not even go into his business dealings, or his son’s business dealings, as the case may be, with various entities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the ruling class of Chinese government. Let’s just say that he buys into the dogma.

But, alas, doctrine changes. Dogma changes. Last week we heard FBI Director Chris Wray say words to the effect that the Chinese government has routinely violated every international law and norm. Laws and norms in the international system keep nations in check. The new story seems to be that China has world hegemony ambitions. The new doctrine is one of Chinese global imperial ambitions, the Belt and the Road. And the question of the hour is, what will the Americans do to contain them? Or, perhaps, what can they do?

We already know the answer. Biden’s record shows he is, at a minimum, tied into the former dogma. And Trump demonstrates that he is in step with the new perception of China’s global aspiration. His very vocal disdain for China’s handling of the Wuhan virus is a clear indication of his position. The choice between Trump and Biden, at least on this important issue, is clear and compelling.

OK. Now I am going out on a limb.

This section is for white people only.

Black people cannot save you on this one. The black vote is not sufficient. White people must show up at the polls and vote for their future and the future of the Republic. In every state, in every region of the country, white people must do their part and make the Trump victory one for the history books. You don’t have to wear a MAGA hat or a red sweat shirt. But you do have to vote. We already know the Democrats have a variety of tricks to subvert the vote and steal the election. The only alternative to their tricks is to go to the polls in huge numbers and exercise your Constitutional right to vote. These things have to be said.

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From the archives – November 2, 2016

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

“Si fractus illabatur orbis, / impavidum ferient ruinae”

“Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
And stand secure amidst a falling world.”

(Horace, Odes 3.3.7-8, translated by Joseph Addison.)

These are times that require a stoic view.

November 3, 2020

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

It’s Election Day! Of all the great wonders of America, this day is, in the words of the great Walt Whitman, “our powerfulest scene and show,” rivaling all others. 

I had prayer last night with Ali Alexander, then went to bed and slept like a baby, convinced not only of the rightness of my choice but its certainty of victory as well. This morning I woke up, checked social media to see what friends were talking about, put on some coffee, and decided to take the day off and watch the day’s events unfolding. What’s the value of stinking money anyway when history is being made?

We know the tricks of the opponents. We know the Democrats will harvest ballots, stuff ballot boxes, close polling places and find all kinds of creative ways to suppress the Republican vote and over-exaggerate their own results. Yes, we know the devil’s tricknology. We know their schemes. They have telegraphed all their punches. We are hip to their game. But we also know that “no weapons formed against us shall prosper.” Selah. 

I am going to time-sequence this blog post. It is 10:49 am. I’ll return around 4pm, then we’ll circle back around 10 pm for the day’s finale. Stay tuned! 

Part Two.

3:44 pm. There are reports of voting irregularities, machines running out of ink, poll workers not being allowed into polling stations, scanners breaking down and voters being told their votes will be scanned later. And it does seem more of these reports are coming out of Pennsylvania, a state where the AG said last night the state would go for Biden. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want my state to be the one to go down in history as a cheater state in a national election, but I guess the Pennsylvania AG doesn’t care about those appearances. Pollwatchers are being intimidated with arrest by the AG, according to numerous tweets, in a clear indication that there is a fear that Democrats are falling behind. Nate Silver, of all people, said that if Biden loses Pennsylvania he should be considered an underdog. Sounds like fear and bet-hedging to me.

In DC, it is reported that the BLM and Antifa activists will be congregating at 4pm. We can only guess what they have planned, but we have seen leaked videos of ZOOM meetings where they an members of their groups have discussed direct mass action and destruction/burning of property and businesses. Meanwhile, businesses in DC have boarded up in anticipation of riots and looting and it seems the DC local government is supporting this terrorist behavior. We live a few blocks from the BLM epicenter at BLM Plaza just up from the White House. In response, there are reports that the White House has put up a third perimeter fence.

All indications are that Trump voters are showing up in East coast urban centers in numbers greater than anticipated.

Here is a good one. As a junior political officer at the US Embassy in London and in anticipation of a tight parliamentary race (this was 1997 and the Tories had been in power for 18 years), I drafted a cable on what happens in the event of tie. I interviewed the leading academic authority on the UK hidden constitution at the time. His wife and my then girlfriend (now wife) at the time worked together so we knew each other socially. (Now he’s a member of the House of Lords!). It was fun. In the case of a tie, it’s the monarch, the Queen who decides. But actually, it wasn’t even close. Labor won hands down. It was a good exercise.

Today folks have asked the question what happens if the Electoral College comes out in a tie. We don’t have a Queen to decide. But don’t worry. It’s not gonna be that close. Stay tuned for Part Three later tonight! 

Part Three.

Well it’s 10:35 pm and way past my normal bedtime. But I’m still up. OK, they need to go ahead and call NC, GA, FL and Ohio for Trump. The counties have reported, except for a few rural non-densely populated ones. Maybe they have called them. I turned off the TV. At this point, also anxious to see what happens with the House. Nancy needs to go! Somebody tweeted the Dems called the House but it’s way too soon. 

I’m gonna have to finish this tomorrow. See ya! 

Part Four

4:30 am. Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin remain undeclared, even though Trump leads in all five by significant margins. The vote counting “stopped” while I was asleep. It really does seem that significant voters are being disenfranchised in a blatant attempt to steal this election. I pray the President will stand strong and not cave. Our Republic is at stake.

I see Pelosi, Waters and Schiff “won” their races. Too bad for the country. But the 2020 census will eliminate some California seats. One can only hope. Meanwhile, maybe a dark horse will emerge among the Democrats and challenge Pelosi’s speakership. Or maybe many will go down with the Biden Crime Family investigation. Again, just speculation.

Part Five.

Just for shits and grins. Here’s the Electoral College map without the cheating and theft of our new banana republic.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

postscript. 11402020

Back to work. But it’s not over yet. Votes are still being counted. And Obamagate still happened. And the Biden Crime Family remains under the magnifying glass. And now, the sleeping giant is awakened.

Sorry folks, it took the old man a few minutes to find this:

November 5, 2020

Posted on November 5, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

The 2020 election is not yet concluded. Votes are still being counted, especially in contested states where Trump is ahead, like North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Michigan, Nevada and Michigan (and you might as well add Wisconsin) have been called for Biden but there are multiple irregularities, such as votes by the deceased, more votes cast than registered voters, and hidden bags of mail-in ballots appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the night, i.e., very amateur and sloppy attempts at cheating. Trump’s people are filing law suits in all the contested states, and Trump supporters are holding peaceful protests around the country to #StopTheSteal. Groups are meeting right here in Washington, DC, but so far I am restricting my activity to flooding the internet highways. Tomorrow that may change.

It looks increasingly like the Democratic governments in the contested states have the courts in their back pockets. We think of this type of governance overseas and we have a name for them: kangaroo courts and banana republics. But their virus of corruption has obviously spread to the good old USA. A republic if we can keep it, said Benjamin Franklin. I guess we goofed up the whole thing after all. The republic is lost, the dream of the founding fathers, toast. It is historic to witness it all, to be here as this history is being made. But it is nothing to brag about. 

Pretty miffed with Twitter and all their censorship. Letting my Twitter family know where to find me on Gab (@dolphinfish) and Parler (@rdmaxwell). Will be parting company with Twitter as soon as this fake election gets straightened out. A Bob Marley tune comes to mind: 

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Bouncing around ideas for NaPoWriMo which began on November 1. I have my play from last year which needs fine tuning. My memoir notes can use some gathering together. Finally, I have my American Century Cycle notes begging for attention. It’s hard to focus on anything with this election turning our lives upside down. And I have work through mid December, making me think the November project may need to be postponed until January. We shall see. 

That’s all folks. Short day.

p.s. Happy Guy Fawkes Day! 

There is something about the Guy Fawkes story that reminds me of the John Brown story. A small remnant of ideologues, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, stands up to the might of the established superpower, fully aware that their efforts may and in fact does result in defeat and death.

#PelosiCrimeFamily #BidenCrimeFamily #StopTheSteal

“Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” Isaiah 1: 9

Addendum. November 5, 2020. 1921.

Last post of the night (and getting added as an addendum to my November 5th Guy Fawkes Night blog post).

I thought the Obama/Biden/Clinton coverup of Benghazi was amateurish, sloppy and poorly executed. I think what we will learn shortly about the attempted theft of an election will reveal the same amateurishness, sloppiness, and poverty of execution but at an extreme level.

They had months to plan this theft. When they were pushing for a phony, groundless impeachment last winter, they should have been using that time to plot. A shipmate of mine used to say organized crime is better than disorganized crime, with a wink and a nod. The level of disorganization of this effort really baffles the mind. And to think they thought they’d get away with it. These people are truly pathetic.

November 6, 2020

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

Today is crucial. The process is fully unfolding. But the blog posts are every OTHER day and we’ll stick to that schedule.

Tomorrow we take a deep dive into diplomatics, the arcane science of authenticating documents, and we will look at the characteristics of the ballot as a legal and binding document. If you are a geek or a nerd like me, or if you have an appreciation for these things, you’ll want to check this out.

Stay tuned. 

November 7, 2020

Posted on November 7, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

Here we go. Taking a break from following the election developments to look at some fundamentals. Today I am going to pull from graduate studies at SOAS (M.A.) and Catholic U (MSLIS) to discuss the topic “Diplomatics and the Ballot” (not to be confused with the Malcolm X speech, The Ballot or the Bullet, a topic for a subsequent blog post).

There is an arcane science known as “diplomatics.” Diplomatics has very little and everything to do with what we think about when we use the similar term, “diplomacy.” So going into that relationship might be a good starting point.

Long long ago in a land far away, conversations and in fact, relationships between what might then be considered “countries” were conducted directly by kings, or often in their place and as their representatives, princes. (While not the same, Trump’s dispatching of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to iron out the wrinkles in the Middle East peace process have that historic precedence. Heaven forbid that a possibly future Biden Presidency should dispatch his crack-addled, child-raping son anywhere to do anything, as consequences might be disastrous.). 

There were no foreign ministers or foreign ministries (or, in the US case, State Department). There were no nation-states for that matter, not like we have today. Nationalism and the nation-state would come into existence later. There were empires and potentates, and loose gatherings of people who sometimes spoke the same language. 

(I know the political reference in the paragraph above may cause me to lose some readers. That’s ok. Let us march forward.)

Those kings and princes would write letters back and forth to their counterparts. These correspondences took the form of the Roman diptych, two plates hinged together whose contents consisted of information conferring certain mutual rights and responsibilities, terms of the deal, so to speak. From here we also get the Greek term, diploo, to double, and the Latin, diploma (doubled), a twice-folded document conferring certain rights and privileges. One might infer here a relationship between diplomacy and “doublespeak,” but that is also a topic for a different blog post. 

The term, “diplomatics,” finds current usage among archivists and librarians as “the analysis of the creation, form, and status of transmission of archival documents or records, and their relationship with the facts represented in them and with their creator, in order to identify, evaluate, and communicate their true nature.” The foremost scholar of diplomatics is a Canadian professor, Luciana Duranti, whose writings provided the above definition.

In this age of digital communications, the idea of authenticating and verifying the origin and veracity of transmitted information takes on a new significance.

Which brings us to part two of this talk.

The “ballot” is the instrument we use, the document, that conveys information on our political preference. We vote by “casting” our ballot, a process whose integrity is paramount and even sacred. The voting process in American politics is considered sacrosanct, and is enshrined in American art and literature.

Good Administration. Elihu Vedder, Library of Congress

Corrupt Legislation. Elihu Vedder, Library of Congress

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The mural to the right shows a young student, on his way to class, casting his ballot. 

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The mural to the left depicts the voting urn in a state of disrepair and disregard, laying down on its side, with the ballots strewn on the ground, while the rich cat places money on the scale to tip it.

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In addition to being a very special document conveying information, the ballot is also a type of written contract establishing the relationship between the voters and their elected representatives. I am fond of saying a ballot is not a third grade Valentine’s Day card. It is a type of diploma, conferring the will of the voters and the responsibilities of elected officials in its exchange. As such, the chain of transmission of the ballot is almost as sacrosanct as ballot itself. It must be authenticable and verifiable. Enough said.

However, and I must pause to mention, the one place where the vote, at least the popular vote for the Presidency, is not enshrined, is the U.S. Constitution. Originally, state legislatures elected members to Congress and the Electoral College elected the President. Later the Constitution was amended to allow for popular election of members of Congress. The popular vote was purely a local thing to elect local and statewide officials. But it was always considered sacred, special, and the integrity of its process, to be protected and preserved at all costs.

Today, we have technologies to protect the integrity of documents and we have visual clues to protect the validity of currency. But we don’t protect the ballot. And we should be able to, but we don’t. I vote electronically for the leadership of my professional association, AFSA. I go online, register, get a special password, and cast my electronic ballot and it is all above board, safe, and verifiable. But for something much more consequential, national politics, we have a process that lacks integrity, and whose instruments are neither verifiable nor authenticable. Instead, we have ballot harvesting, ballot counterfeiting, ballot box stuffing, and various other forms of document spoilage that breakdown the integrity of the process. This breakdown practically ensures loss of integrity in the relationship between the rights of the voters, the responsibilities of elected officials, and the promise of a fair and safe process.

I don’t know what’s next. Legend has it that a young boy approached Benjamin Franklin on the steps of Constitution Hall in Philadelphia (of all places, given the rampant practice of voter fraud in that once special city) and asked him, as he departed the convention, “What do we have, Mr. Franklin.” Franklin responded, “We have a Republic, if we can keep it.” As I wrote in an earlier blog post, and paraphrasing the poet Etheridge Knight, “I guess we goofed up the whole thing after all.” The Republic appears to be lost, the dream of the founding fathers, toast. It is historic to witness it all, to be here as this history is being made. But it is nothing to brag about.

Here is the Knight poem, from Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54239/the-sun-came

The Sun Came

By Etheridge Knight

                                                        And if sun comes
                                                        How shall we greet him?
                                                                    —Gwen Brooks

The sun came, Miss Brooks,—
After all the night years.
He came spitting fire from his lips.
And we flipped—We goofed the whole thing.
It looks like our ears were not equipped
For the fierce hammering.

And now the Sun has gone, has bled red,
Weeping behind the hills.
Again the night shadows form.
But beneath the placid face a storm rages.
The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck
The core. We cannot sleep.
The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm.
The darkness ain’t like before.

The Sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain’t no vision visited my cell.)

Etheridge Knight, “The Sun Came” from The Essential Etheridge Knight. Copyright © 1986 by Etheridge Knight. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.  Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

November 9, 2020

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

I didn’t remember it because at the time I was in Accra, Ghana planning logistics support for US election observers country-wide for Ghana’s historic 2000 election. But I read yesterday that Al Gore was President-elect for 37 days, until he wasn’t. Something to think about. Need to find an open library and check the vertical file for the 2000 election.

The talk yesterday at A Splendid Wake on the Merze Tate poem went well. I’ve posted the text of my remarks on my librarianship blog here. Going to a wake can be a cathartic experience. This one certainly was. As we were warming up for the Zoom event, I mentioned to the other presenters the new concept I learned on Star Trek Discovery Season 3 Episode 4, Forget Me Not. It was all about the crew’s shared trauma and post traumatic growth. Loved it! 

The election process continues. The mockingbird press has announced Biden/Harris as victors, but there are so many states still in contention that it is not prudent nor necessary at this point to declare a winner. There are really just too many irregularities, gross ones, all pointing in the same direction for it to be random chance or human error. I am keeping my powder dry.

Powder dry and planning to attend the big Stop the Steal and Million Maga March in DC this Saturday. 

Random tweets of the day.

So funny. At the end of the day, even the MSM networks have to retain some semblance of credibility. I see them all with their wet thumbs in the air.

Yep. Knowing the in-between-the-lines of talking points is like “reading the room.” Useful skills from old Mother State.

In due course, people will go to their leaders, their professors, the people they respect and honor and ask them, “Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you give me correct guidance?” Be ready for that, be prepared.

Someone asked me, “Ray, why post these silly Bible verses?” It’s because I know the power of the mantra, the power of the chant, and the deep-seatedness of the oral tradition in the human psyche. In the beginning was the word (there he goes again). Can I get a witness, y’all?

postscript. November 10. 2020 5:34 am. Mr. Biden said in a speech last night, where he billed himself as the “presumptive” president-elect (which he most certainly is not), “Let’s give each other a chance.” Here is your chance, Mr. Biden. Come clean to the American people. Come clean on Tara Reade. Come clean on Benghazi. Come clean of Osama Bin Ladin. Come clean on your son Hunter’s business dealings with China and Ukraine and your knowledge of those dealings. In fact, come clean on Hunter’s laptop which was definitely not “just a distraction and a smear.” Come clean on that “. . . most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics” you claimed you helped Obama put together. And once you have come clean, Mr. Biden, we might think about giving you a chance to clean up your legacy. But for now, for right now, President Trump is the President of the United States of America and don’t you forget it.

November 11, 2020

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

I started my day around 5 am with coffee and a tweet:

“Happy Veterans Day to all my brother and sister veterans. We answered the call to serve because that’s who we are. No need to thank us for our service – we’ve already been paid in so many immeasurable ways. Thank our families and our spouses for their faithful and undying support.”

Yes. It is Veterans Day, “a federal holiday in the United States observed annually on November 11, for honoring military veterans, that is, persons who have served in the United States Armed Forces.” I enlisted in the Navy in 1979, spent four years on two great submarines, the Hammerhead and the Michigan, entered a commissioning program at the end of my enlistment in 1985, graduated and received a Naval Reserve commission in 1987, and served on active duty until 1991. Twelve years of service. These milestones correspond to chapters in my memoirs so I will be adding hyperlinks to chapter drafts later. 

This Veterans Day is special. We are in the midst of a national election marred by repeated examples of voter fraud and vote manipulation. It’s not the America we signed up to defend against all enemies, foreign or domestic. It’s not the America we bore true faith and allegiance to. It’s a banana republic where the people’s vote means nothing. And if the courts fail to overturn this most faulty election, then we must consider the idea that we have kangaroo courts in this banana republic.

Moreover, we do not merely represent to ourselves the best form of governance. We represent to the entire world, and especially to new governments in the early stages of democratic governance. I have been assigned to countries where voting for elected officials, for example, was at best a rare and irregular event, and at worst, a new thing altogether. I clearly recall holding a sealed bid property disposal sale and having local employees ask me, “Mr. Maxwell, is this what voting is like?” We take these citizenship responsibilities for granted.

Anyway, we have got to get it right. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Our credibility as a nation is at stake. And our reputation as a haven for correct and proper holdings of elections is also on the line.

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In my former career I learned how to both read between the lines and read the room. Even had an introduction course in tea leaves and coffee sludge! All that to say my inbox is already filling up with what looks like Biden candidacy post-mortems. Perhaps I’ll live to eat these words. Perhaps not. 

It is still at the stage of doublespeak, of course, but obvious to any casual political observer. Such titles leap out at me (some by center and left publications): 

“Why Trump’s Fraud Fantasy is Only Gaining Steam”

“The Trump Era is ending but I don’t feel any different”

“Election Fraud is not a conspiracy theory” 

“10 reasons why Pennsylvania results may be irredeemably compromised” 

“Why America Needs a Reckoning with the Trump Era”

The same press that rushed to declare Biden the winner before all the votes had been counted and before the election itself was certified, is now slightly hedging its bets with mealy-mouthed language because they know the future will hold them responsible for their deeds and their complicity with a poorly managed and fraudulent election.

As James Brown, the Godfather of Soul would say, “Get ready for the big payback.”

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Flashback to Veterans Day 2016. Music and poetry!

November 13, 2020

Posted on November 14, 2020 by Raymond Maxwell 

I don’t have a pre-selected topic for today’s post. Work has had me busy as heck, and all the chatter about election fraud and vote irregularity has had my head swimming. An old friend and mentor is heading up the State Department transition team, such as it is at this point. One of my former mentees now outside of State got a call but has no interest in relocating to DC right now. 

Woke up this morning to a lot of activity on social media about firings at DOD and rumors of more firings in the national security field writ large. I don’t know and it is not my worry nor my place to speculate, gracas a Deus. Lots of speculation today about the Durham report, anticipated in the next few day.

Folks are arriving in town for the big Stop The Steal 2020 rally and march tomorrow. Should be interesting. Simultaneously, Catholics are holding the Jericho March in state capitals and in Washington, DC. making seven circumambulations around the capitol building (and the walls come tumbling down!). Can’t wait to see the activity. Unfortunately we won’t be attending. I have dragged my long-suffering wife to so many crazy places and she has been a sport about supporting me each time. I need to change that behavior.

My birthday gift to me arrives tonight. The new iPad Air 4 and accessories! Whoops, only the package of accessories from Amazon arrived. And may I say I hate the leather cover? It might grow on me. Or it might go right back to Amazon.

I want to say a word here about social media. It boggles my mind the way people who don’t even know you feel emboldened and even to entitled to impugn your character over a silly tweet or facebook status that goes against the dominant narrative. I mean, what is this, 1984? Or maybe OneState? I can handle it, don’t you worry, and at the end of the day there is always the “block” feature. But what hurts my heart just a little are the people I consider friends, those with whom I have had long standing relationships, launching virulent attacks defending the whole Biden bullshit narrative and refusing to consider any other version of what’s happening here with the election being stolen by hook or crook. Speaking of which, I’m not going to bother with preserving any of these out-of-the-blue verbal assaults. But I will cut and paste below some of my tweets and updates that gave rise to them. For history’s sake, I will only tell my side of the story and leave them to tell their sides as they see fit. Also a couple tweets on the passing of Jerry Rawlings, former President of Ghana.

The good news is that I have come up with a way to blend together my memoir chapters (pre-Navy, Navy, and foreign service) with my blog posts, correspondence and essays as a librarian. “Confessions of a Late-In-Life Librarian” will cover all the periods in a somewhat chronological but often bumpy way. I got the idea from the mention of Giotto’s three-point-perspective on last week’s episode of Star Trek Discovery, Season 3 Episode 5, “Die Trying.” The idea, explained by Captain Saru in a lovely monologue towards the end, is that Giotto’s development of three-point perspective in painting helped artists out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. The combination of letters, blog posts, poetry, and essays, with perhaps a cool very post-modern play somewhere in the narrative, provides a depth perspective that may be seen as unique. Of course it may also be seen as contrived and incoherent! Luckily I’m not doing it for the money.

Now, from Twitter and Facebook – 

November 15, 2020                                       

It’s not my intention to sound alarmist in any way. I just learned that WordPress is deplatforming The Conservative Treehouse,

…”given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”

The Conservative Treehouse provided an exceptional and unparalleled source of sound, authentic real-time information during the Obama/Biden/Clinton Benghazi coverup.

Freedom of speech and assembly are in mortal danger in this country.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I am a bit concerned. More than a bit. So much so that I believe I should spend more time collating old material and content than trying to create new stuff right now.

November 17, 2020                           

           

This is how we get the news these days. A grapevine of sorts, the African drumbeat lets us know what’s really happening because the mainstream media is completely bought off and compromised. Nevada has basically invalidated the election. Michigan is headed in that direction. Pennsylvania is hearing the case in the courts tomorrow to decide. If no candidate gets to 270, it goes to the House. If it goes to the House, Trump wins.

We are living in historical times. Again. Just my luck. Most people are not watching this closely and have followed, hook, line, and sinker, the whole Biden/Harris presidential-elect drama. Wrong playhouse, buster. The real story is unwinding in the streets, in the courts, and in social media.

There is not a lot more to say. There will be more news tomorrow. The Constitution, we must conclude, is more than “a goddamn piece of paper,” attributed to former VP Dick Cheney. It is a mighty ship of state that will shelter us through this storm. But don’t get me to preaching.

Here’s a spreadsheet full of evidence of election fraud and a pattern of irregularity throughout the country. In my estimation, the Democrats and anti-Trump forces tried to stage a coup under the guise of a crooked election. We will soon see if they succeed or fail. My money, though I’m not a gambling man, is on Trump. Call me any name you want.

Here is something from the archives, never published, in case y’all forgot. https://raymmaxx.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/lorem-ipsum/                               

November 19, 2020           

After today’s RNC press conference (and I hope you were able to take it all in), it may be a good time to assess the various options. There are only two options, of course – a second term Trump presidency or a Biden/Harris presidency. But each of the two have a variety of tributaries and various consequences for the body politic.

Biden bills himself as the president-elect. The national news organizations have called the election for Biden, but their method is questionable considering the events of election night. President Trump says he won the election, though the results do not yet bear it out. Several states’ results are in question, including Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Evidence of irregularities abounds, all benefiting one candidate, though because of that you won’t hear any of it mentioned on the 6 o’clock news.

So here we are. Biden/Harris can push forward, and if all Trump legal actions fail, they will be inaugurated on January 20, 2020. But the half of the population that supported Trump’s re-election, and by some accounts, 30% of the Democrats will suspect, at most, they stole the election, and at least, that they arrived by some very questionable means, resulting in a severely weakened presidency domestically, and perceptions of crookedness abroad.

Trump’s legal actions may succeed in reversing the election results, but then Biden-Harris supporters will cry foul, and for a while, Antifa and BLM will create certain pandemonium in the streets, potentially shutting down major cities. Until, that is, a handful get arrested and imprisoned, which will cool their jets as they are only fair weather soldiers.

There is something to be said for whether, should Trump succeed, he will win via the House or via SCOTUS. Either way, and in fact, even if Biden-Harris succeed, the greatest challenge by far will be healing a divided country. But with Biden-Harris, the damage to the Republic, in my estimation, will be far greater and have longer lasting consequences. Because it clearly will be a stolen election, outside the will of, by and for the people. A banana republic will be all we have left, tottering at the edge of advanced and totally corrupt empire. I believe a Trump Presidency can save us, or at least propel us in the right direction.

postscript: I wrote the following in a tweet:

“I personally felt, from my perch in Ghana (in 2000) at the time, that Gore gave up too soon, and that he should have had more confidence in the naval architecture of the ship of state. Just my opinion. It was hard explaining it all to the Ghanaians, who successfully held an election rejecting a 19-year incumbent and voting in a new guy. Here’s a link to the blog draft chapter from that part of my memoirs.

More on today’s press conference here.

November 21, 2020                                       

This is one of those Saturdays. I spent a few moments this morning trying to figure out what entity at the national level was/is responsible for election integrity, only to discover there is no national entity. No wonder Dominion et.al. was able to swoop in and seize control, There is the Federal Election Commission, but it is only responsible for federal campaign contributions and laws governing them. There are secretaries of state in each state and the District of Columbia and several states also have state-wide election commissions with state responsibilities, eighty-five (85) such entities in total. But they are not interconnected or cross-connected as such. And at the national level, nothing is guarding the hen house, so to speak. It is virtually like stealing candy from a baby. My friend Sharyl Attkisson posted a list of election fraud stories and links which is helpful as we steer through the morass. And I previously posted a link to this collection of evidence sources, today up to 616 sources and cites. That list has grown by over 50 links since yesterday.

Changing the subject ever so slightly, I am astonished at how much my extracurricular reading habits have been enriched by the various Star Trek episodes of late. A bit of personal history is in order here. I was as much a Star Trek fan as anybody else until a part time work responsibility at the Greensboro Coliseum required I served as an usher for a Gene Roddenberry lecture. This would have been back in the 70’s when he was still alive and when I was a struggling undergraduate. I watched and listened, infected by his vision and the early development of the Star Trek idea. Then, in the late 70’s, while attending Navy Nuclear Power School, then in Orlando, Florida, we would gather in the barracks common room each afternoon after class and before dinner to watch two TV programs, almost religiously: Star Trek and Kung Fu. I swear it was part of Rickover’s curriculum, but that is an entirely different issue as Rickover’s curriculum had many elements.

But back to the subject. The recent series, Star Trek: Picard grabbed my attention early in the lockdown. I confess between deployments, education, and overseas assignments I missed a great deal of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and all the other ones since the 80’s. But with Picard, an old love was reborn. Well, in two episodes, the spacecraft pilot Cristobal Rios, was reading a book on the bridge, Tragic Sense of Life. I rewound, froze the frame, and wrote down the title. And directly to Amazon I went. It is a Spanish classic, available in translation in its entirety online. And it is definitely worth reading, but I won’t spoil it or you for you. Here is a brief sampling

“There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. and thus sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it. Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness . . . . And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.”

Just two more thoughts so hold on!

In season 2 of Star Trek Discovery, Episode 6, “The Sound of Thunder” ends with a charming dialog between Commander Burnham, the half-Vulcan, and the Kelpian, Captain Saru, straight from Aeschylus. Burnham is reminded of Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian, who wrote that “He who learns must suffer. And even ,in our sleep, pain that cannot forgAeet falls drop by drop from the heart.” Luck ;ily I had Aeschylus at home in the Great Books of the Western World. the complete quote is from Agamemnon, lines 202-210:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

The final entry for tonight may go a bit long. In season 3 (the present season) Episode 5, “Die Trying,” Captain Saru explains to Admiral Vance and Commander Burnham, very poetically, the role of the proto-Renaissance painter, Giotto, who, through his development of three-point perspective in painting, in effect changed the way people looked at art through the imposition of two-dimensional depth, ushering in the Renaissance. In fact, some writers refer to Giotto as the Father of the Renaissance. “After an inspiring monologue from Saru in which he suggests that, as Italian painter Giotto helped usher in the Renaissance by developing the idea of three-point perspective, so Discovery might be able to help Starfleet “look up” in its own Dark Ages.“

It caused me to wonder about the short-lived American Renaissance, 1876-1917, and who might have been its Giotto parallel, adding depth to lift American letters out of its dark ages. I am voting for Herman Melville for the volume and variety of his work and for my own selfish reasons but it is something to think about. And who might have been the Giotto parallel, the Father of the New Negro Renaissance, 1920-1950, as former slaves emerged from Reconstruction armed with new found literacy skills. Howard’s Alain Locke as Dean of the movement, later called the Harlem Renaissance, takes the credit, but in my estimation, his essays and correspondence fall short materially. I am going to go with Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote plays, poems, short stories, novels, and literary criticism during the prelude period, 1890-1906. Yep, Dunbar. And who might a more recent Giotto parallel be? The world is different now, but I am leaning towards a combo of the multi-media artist Romare Bearden and the poet/playwright August Wilson. There is a lot in this paragraph to flesh out, and we will do that later.

November 23, 2020

The following is a public service announcement: If y’all are not reading Dr. Dossy’s tweets (https://twitter.com/DrDannielle) and Lame Cherry’s daily blog posts (https://lamecherry.blogspot.com) you are missing critical, real-time information. Knowledge is power. Information is the coin of the realm. Knowledge is power. Be there or be square.

A former friend and old colleague was named to a high cabinet post in a would-be Biden administration. They do have to plan. The following verses from the Holy Qur’an (8:29-30) are instructive:

“O ye who believe! If you fear God, He will grant you a Criterion (to judge between right and wrong), remove from you (all) evil (that may afflict you), and forgive you. For God is the Lord of grace unbounded.

“Remember how the Unbelievers plotted against thee, to keep thee in bonds, or slay thee. or get thee out (of thy home). They plot and plan, and God too plans, but the best of planners is God.”

Articles detailing evidence of election fraud and vote irregularity continue to rack up. Just the News published this list today.

In touch with three old colleagues and friends today. All retired, all reflecting on changes in the organization, all thrilled to be freed of all the ridiculous restraints. Why do we do a job that we hate? Is it all for the money, the mortgage, the tuition costs that are coming? What part is driven by ambition, position, power? How much and how often do we sell our souls, and how much soul is left at the end of the line? I suppose the ones like us who retire and make a clean break, no matter the circumstances, are perhaps the lucky ones, because, as I said in a previous correspondence, reflecting on post-foreign service life –

There is no call to prayer in DC, only the low frequency

rumbling of the federal bureaucracy, grinding human souls into

inanimate dust.

The streets of this town are full of fofoca, gossiping, rumor-mongering about how this election is going to turn out. No one knows for sure, not matter how much certainty they project. But tell me, how can any future Democratic administration have a reasonable expectation about a normal transition of power after the way Obama and his crew treated the Trump folks, spying on them, taping their conversations, raising all sorts of suspicions about Russian collusion? And what was Obama thinking about? Didn’t he know he was creating a precedent that would come back and bite him in the butt? What don’t people get about Karma? The way you treat other people is the way you will be treated!

That’s why the Golden Rule is “do until others as you would have them do unto you!” It makes me feel a bit ill because despite my motivations, I really had high hopes for the Obama crew. But I should have known. Chicago politician. I should have seen the signs. And frankly, for good or for ill, throwing Jeremiah Wright under the bus should have been an unmistakable sign of things to come.

It’s all water over the dam, or under the bridge, your choice, as my father would say. It is the day after the anniversary of the 1963 Kennedy assassination, another Democrat who stole an election. I am feeling a wee bit despondent. There is not going to be a happy ending. Some will lose. Some will win. Which one does what is probably inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. But none will live happily ever after. This play is a tragedy and there is no redemption. It’s like that nightmare I had in Baghdad. I am walking down a deserted street. It is dark and getting cold. The buildings on either side of the street are empty. Though it’s spooky, there is no human life to threaten me. But the street is dead ended. And there is no turning back.

November 25, 2020                                                   

I watched live footage for about an hour over a late lunch break. The testimonies of witnesses to the Pennsylvania state legislature hearing on election issues in Gettysburg today were quite damning. The reports of intimidation, the threats by poll workers, against women, against the elderly made my heart hurt. Quite damning. Seems many election workers, average joes like you and me, were actively complicit in the vote theft and election fraud. We cannot place the blame solely on machines, programming, or algorithms. Crimes were committed by people and acknowledging that is painful for me, the son of a mother who always volunteered for poll and voting station duty.

So what is going to happen? In the case of Pennsylvania, it seems the Governor, the AG and the Secretary of State are all a part of the scam, so there’s no hope at the state certification level. Can’t say about the other swing states in question. As far as I can see there is no indication that the state delegations will make the decision to overturn election results, right or wrong. The state courts, correspondingly, are corrupted and we already know that. Folks seem to think the Supreme Court will step forward if it means saving the Republic. But as a descendant of enslaved people, I have little confidence in the Supremes – didn’t they get it wrong in both the Dred Scott case and Plessy v Ferguson? The Supremes are more about preservation and continuity of the status quo. I’ll listen to arguments to the contrary, but I know what I know.

BREAKING NEWS! JUDGE BLOCKS CERTIFICATION OF PENNSYLVANIA ELECTION RESULTS

When it all boils down to a low gravy, most of the checks and balances inherent in the system, that normal white Americans take for granted, will not save us and certainly will not save the Republic. I learned that as a child. That it didn’t crush me is a phenomenon I cannot explain. The final line against total calamity is the President and the oath he took, the military and the oath they take, and ultimately, we the people and the individual rights enshrined in the Constitution and our willingness to defend those rights, one by one, against tyranny.

Today’s good news is the full Presidential pardon for General Flynn. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We shall give thanks regardless of the rottenness and corruption that surround us and threaten our survival.

In the final analysis, I am comforted in a revolutionary way by the words of an old Baptist hymn:

My hope is built on nothing less

than Jesus’ blood and righteousness

I dare not trust the sweetest frame

but wholly lean on Jesus’ name

On Christ the solid rock I stand

all other ground is sinking sand

p.s. Flashback. Blog post from November 26, 2016

684 Art and Museum Librarianship: Assignments 1-3

Assignment 1: Adding Poetry Archives to the ARLIS Under Digital Humanities

Bibliographic Essay

Is Poetry Art?  And if so, is there a space in the study of art museum librarianship for a new publication highlighting the numerous examples and manifestations of poetry archival practices?

This proposal answers both the above questions in the affirmative.   The proposal includes a brief survey of the literature, identifying the gaps that exist in the coverage of poetry archives.  I identify examples of poetry archival efforts that may qualify for inclusion under a new rubric that includes poetry within the overall category of digital humanities.  I list poetry archival projects that exist and are not ready for inclusion but soon may be.  Finally, I propose a new publication, a book of essays by experts at poetry archival organizations already listed, that may serve to mark off the terrain of poetry archival practices.

To open the literature survey, let’s take a quick look at Ranganathan’s Fifth Law of Library Science, which states that the library is a growing organism (Ranganathan, 2006).  Ranganathan explains that the library can be characterized as a growing organism because it is made up of three parts, a trinity, the parts of which are also growing, i.e., the staff of the library, the books themselves, and the public, the readers, and that these subcomponents not only grow, but equally, interact with each other in a very dynamic and “growing” way.  Similarly, we know intuitively that a museum follows a similar pattern, with a public who visits the museum for education and for entertainment, the artifacts that are arranged in a display for the public, and the museum staff, led by a curator and a librarian or library director.

McCann reveals the interesting interdependency that exists between the library director, the curator, and the public (McCann, 1933).  The curator classifies and identifies the artifacts and arranges them in some meaningful fashion, and the librarian supplies the information on which the curator bases his/her artistic decisions, the background, the provenance, and the ultimate origin of the material being exhibited.  The artifacts, the things being arranged, of course, are analogous to books, or documents, thus keeping intact the Ranganathan trinity.

John Falk, in chapter 10 of his essay, “Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience,” lays out some ideas for ensuring that the museum experience adds value for visitors.  Many of these ideas are generally useful, but of particular value to the art collections on which we are focusing.  Museum visitors have varying needs, and museum staffs must work to accommodate those needs (Falk, 2009).  Some visitors, for example, are explorers, seeking to satisfy already formed personal interests.  For them, museum staff should design exhibitions that facilitate their exploration in an accurate and precise way.  Some visitors may be facilitators themselves, accompanying small children, or elderly groups, or students, or whatever members of a group they support.  Facilitators will need to occupy the minds of their members, and keep them stimulated and interested.  Museum staff will have to be present to work with facilitators to ensure their success.  Some visitors are experience seekers, looking for the newest exhibit, or one that particularly appeals to them.  Experience seekers require an overview and may prefer a quick dose of superficial information rather than a deep dive.

Poetry is a well-established art form, dating back to ancient times, examples of which are still intact.  Numerous poetry archives exist in substantive form on websites and at universities and literary institutions throughout the United States and in Canada and the United Kingdom. These poetry archive locations have staffs, and they receive large numbers of visitors, just like museums. They contain artifacts, whose information is highly sought by students, scholars, and the general public. The Ranganathan trinity is satisfied.  And yet, a careful search of the ARLIS website does not result in a discovery of a poetry page or a publication aggregating poetry archival efforts, or any attention devoted to the poetry art form.  There may have been very valid reasons for this exclusion many years ago, prior to the digital and digitizing age.  There may also be a valid reason for the dearth of literature related to the inclusion of poetry archives among art library collection considerations.  However, we are reminded that the Roman poet Horace said words to the effect that “A painting is just a poem without words.”

This proposal sets forth a standard by which to measure, among the numerous examples, the existing poetry archive sites that are serious collections, ones which might warrant a close look by ARLIS for inclusion on a possible website page for its membership or in a future publication.  After outlining selection criteria, I will offer sites that satisfy that selection criteria.

The archival site should have the following features sought by students and the general public:

• archived poetry covering a significant period or dedicated to a significant artist;
• recorded archives of actual readings of the poetry covered;
• regular podcasts or real time radio broadcasts that are downloadable;
• downloadable mp3 files of lectures, conference and symposium proceedings;
• on-going on-line courses, lectures, MOOC’s;
• integration with social media for access and sharing;
• subscription capability, i.e., members can subscribe to regular periodic updates.

The following five sites presently meet the above criteria (unless otherwise noted, all information is from the designated website):

1. PennSound.  PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) is a web-based archive for non-commercial distribution of the largest collection of poetry sound files on the Internet. PennSound offers a large variety of digital recordings of poems — currently 1,500 and rapidly growing — mostly as song-length singles.  PennSound directors are famed poet Charles Bernstein and English professor Al Filreis.   PennSound hosts over 3500 downloadable links to single poems.  Associated programs and lectures and supporting documents are also archived.  Recordings of over 560 individual poets reading their own works are preserved for perpetuity.  And scores of poetry programs are recorded/produced at Kelly Writer’s House, also associated with PennSound, on the campus of University of Pennsylvania.  PennSound is an on-going archiving project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing archives and associated documentation. According to the PennSound manifesto, all media archived must be free and downloadable, MP3 quality or better, in singles format, clearly named and identifiable, indexed, and embedded with bibliographic material in the file (provenance).

2. UBUweb.  UBUweb (http://ubu.com) began in 1996 as a website focused on visual and concrete poetry.  As internet technology developed and expanded, UBUweb grew and increased its capacity, adding sound poetry files when streaming audio technology became available, and adding MP3 files and video as bandwidth increased.  UBUweb also maintains an archive of “off-beat” historical artistic performances, films, radio plays, and eclectic music files.  In 2005, UBUweb acquired the 365 Days Project, a collection of celebrity gaffs, song-poems, how-to recordings, and spoken word pieces.  UBUweb holds over 2500 full length avant-garde films and movies, all free and all downloadable.  UBUweb hosts over 7500 artists and several thousand works of art.  Its current director is Kenneth Goldsmith, Poet-In-Residence at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

3. Poets.org. Poet.org (www.poets.org) is the on-line representation of the Academy of American Poets, founded in 1934.  Poets.org first went online in 1993, but was re-launched with a new website in 2005.  It is one of the most popular non-profit poetry sites on the web, hosting over 2000 poems, over 500 poet biographies, 400 essays and interviews, 150 audio recordings of poetry, lesson plans for high school teachers or English and Humanities, and a poem-a-day email service for tens of thousands of subscribers.  Poets.org offers written works, photos, biographies, interviews, audio recordings, a purchasable DVD, a list of related poets, and external links on contemporary poets.  Founded by Marie Bullock in 1934, the Academy is led by executive director Jennifer Benka, author of several collections of poetry.  On-going programs include National Poetry Month, Academy Book Awards, live archives dating back to 1963, a host of educational programs, and the American Poet Magazine.  Its Board of Chancellors includes America’s top poets and poetry scholars.

4.  The Poetry Foundation.  The Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org),  Led by Executive Director John Barr, is the publisher of Poetry magazine and is an independent literary organization committed to discovering the best poetry and making it available to the widest audience.  Founded by Harriet Moore in 1912, its parent magazine, Poetry is the oldest monthly magazine dedicated to poetry in the English-speaking world.  The Poetry Foundation was established in 2003 by a philanthropic gift from Ruth Lilly.  The Poetry Foundation library (Katherine Litwin is the Library Director) hosts a collection of over 30,000 volumes, audio and video recordings.  The Poetry Foundation hosts a number of education programs, collaborates with universities, and send daily poetry emails to its members.

5.  The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.  The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/archives.html) is led by Steve Dickison.  It was established in 1954 and funded with the honorarium paid to and then returned by W.H Auden when he read his poetry to celebrate the opening of the University.  Since 1954, the University has recorded every poet who has read on campus and has added it to the archive, which now exceeds over 4000 hours of recorded audio and video.  In 1994, the archive was transferred to a climate controlled vault.  An on-line catalog contains over 2000 hours of original video recordings made since 1973.

These five examples of poetry archiving organizations are ready now for aggregation and exhibition.  Other examples do not quite meet the stringent requirements set forth earlier in this paper, such as Naropa Audio Archive (http://archive.org/details/naropa), the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center (http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/poetryaudio/), the U.K. Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do), and Concordia University’s (Montreal) SpokenWeb http://spokenweb.concordia.ca/).

Falk, John H.  Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience.  Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. (2009)

Hollister, Christopher V. Handbook of Academic Writing for Librarians. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries.  (2013)

McCann, G.L. “The Art Museum Serves the Curator.” Special Libraries 23/24.  (1933)

Ranganathan, S.R. The Five Laws of Library Science.  Bangalore: Ess Ess Publications.  (2006)

Assignment #2

In-House Research Practicum Proposal Statement: American Holocaust

Subject: American Holocaust

Institution: The Holocaust Memorial Museum

Rationale: Two significant mass killings over an extended period of time mark American history, the 94-115 million Native American killed by plague, starvation and hostile action against them (1500-1900) and the 100 million Africans and African Americans killed over the middle passage, as slave labor, or by lynching (1700-1960). The Holocaust Memorial Museum (HMM) is designed to conduct research on just these types of large genocidal movements. More significantly, however, will be using original sources to trace the evolution of the idea of racial genocide and how it ultimately produced the European Holocaust that is the focus of the HMM.
I propose a sort of shuttle-diplomacy collaboration, gathering information initially that exists at the HMM. Gaps are sure to emerge, possibly requiring information from other sources, and from other institutions. Conducting that gap-analysis, though, and keeping the designated contact at HMM apprised of the shortfall may also serve to enrich the holdings of the HMM. Such a multi-disciplinary and orthogonally cross-cutting in-house research project would not only advance the HMM’s knowledge of these historical events, but it would make the institution smarter and more aware of the thin slice it is focused on as a well as the broad picture that makes up the over-arching truth.

There is more than just a casual connection between the American Holocaust and the European Holocaust of WW2, of course. The justifications for the way American settlers historically dealt with the “sub-human” “other,” whether “savage” Indians or “inferior” African slaves, created the need for “scientific” rationalizations, resulting in the development of Social Darwinism and the American pseudo-science, Eugenics. Eugenics crossed the Atlantic and contributed directly and in documented ways to the development of racial superiority theories in the pre WW1 Balkans and later in post WW1 Germany, resulting in the European Holocaust. An excellent starting point will be Marek Kohn’s The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science.

Collaboration across many sources requires discipline and focus. There would have to be a tight feedback loop between the researcher and the faculty advisor, as well as between the researcher and a designated point of contact at HMM, along with regular meetings, regular information sharing, and regular mid-course corrections.

Assignment #3

Dr. McCann’s article, “The Art Museum Library Serves the Curator,” brings into sharp relief and high resolution the distinct roles of the curator and the library director in the modern art museum environment. The article is short and pithy: McCann asserts that the library combines the curatorial staff and the reference staff; the library plays an integral and essential role in providing information to the public; the curator depends on the resources of the library to get his/her information accurate and precise regarding exhibits and collections of artifacts and lacks both the time and the expertise to perform necessary reference work unaided; from the curator’s point of view, the information source, i.e., the library performs an indispensable role in coordinating, organizing and preserving information and is the very “heart” of the museum; a curator, backed by an able and well-trained librarian, provides a much better service to the public. (McCann, 1933).

The various sites we visited confirmed these assertions. We saw at Hillwood the indispensable role of the museum library to identify not only the artifacts themselves, but the provenance of the articles and the chain of custody and its significance, particularly when the country of origin is in the midst of monumental political upheaval. We saw it at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where many artifacts were part of a worldwide dispersal, a diaspora that made it very difficult to piece together a story detailing human horror, yet a significant story celebrating human survival. We saw it at the African Art Museum, where we came to understand clearly that one cannot separate a study of religion, or a study of political history, or a study of anthropology from the study of great art. And there are plenty of other examples from among the museums and libraries we visited but space doesn’t allow us to cite every example. We were able to conclude that it is not enough to be able to arrange the artifacts, that one has to know something about how the things existed in their original, their natural form, the environment that gave them life, and perhaps, that gave them death.

There was one visit that was arguably exceptional in this regard. But first, let’s prepare the ground just a bit and in an interdisciplinary way. In a different class, we studied Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science and in an exercise each student chose his favorite law. My choice was number five, i.e., that a library is a growing organism, largely because its subcomponents are also growing organisms (Ranganathan, 1929). We learned from out site visits that, similarly, a museum is also a growing organism, and in fact, perhaps, a museum is just an outgrowth of a library. Ranganathan sets forth a sort of “trinity” of factors, the books, the readers (the public), and the library staff, a trinity that interacts dynamically. (I saw this trinity before in Clausewitz, but that was a different life). I suspect McCann was aware of Ranganathan’s work, and perhaps saw a different trinity within the staff, i.e., the library staff, the curatorial staff, and the artifacts, but that remains to be established.

In yet another class, we studied a model of the reference process (Agosto, et.al., 2011). The model shows a dynamic inter-relationship between the reference user, the librarian, and the aggregation of information resources. Again, it is a trinity, one that moves as it interacts internally, a sort of nuclear power plant that produces more power than it consumes in producing that power. Agosto, et.al., take Ranganathan’s trinity a step further, however, with the idea of 2.0, i.e., that the user is seeking information, but also bringing and inputing information into the triangle, creating more knowledge, creating more power.

Which brings us to the exceptional visit I mentioned earlier. By personalizing his career path and his career successes for us, the library director at the Corcoran made us want to be him, he made us see that what he attained was out there for us to aspire to. That was priceless, and would have been sufficient in and of itself. But he took it a step further (and we discussed this in class, so I am not claiming any sense of originality — I am just documenting it). He said words to the effect that when he goes to an exhibition, he sees the results of a reference question, transformed into a beautiful work of art. It was a bit of a biblical moment for me, as in, “In the beginning was the Word…And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John: 1:1, 14). In one fell swoop, and perhaps unknowingly, that library director compressed into one moment Ranganathan, McCann, and Agosto, and in do so, epitomized the librarian’s function, to facilitate the creation of knowledge and power.

Agosto, D., et.al. (2011). “A Model of the Reference and Information Service Process.” Reference and User Services Quarterly, Vol. 50. no. 3, pp. 235-44. Retrieved from https://blackboard.cua.edu.

McCann, G. (1933). “The Art Museum Library Serves the Curator.” Special Libraries, May 1933, pp. 86-88. Retrieved from https://blackboard.cua.edu.

Ranganathan, S. (1929). The Five Laws of Library Science. Bangalore: Ess Ess Publications, pp. 382-384.

The Birth and the Death of the New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO)

           The New International Information Order (NIIO), also known as the New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), was a short-lived UNESCO initiative that focused on global information policy.  In this paper I will examine the origin and short life of this initiative within the UN bureaucracy.  I will analyze how and why it came to be, and how it met its end.  I will conclude with some thoughts on why such an organization is needed today, more than ever before, especially in light of new global technologies for storing, transmitting and distributing information.

Keywords: information policy, new information order, international conventions

The Birth and the Death of the New World Information and Communications Order

Introduction

A passing reference in a Buckland article (Buckland, 1997) to the existence of the International Institute for Cooperation, an agency of the short-lived League of Nations, sparked my interest in exploring international institutions dedicated to global information policy.  That, a few searches later, led me to the New World Information Order, also known as the New World Information and Communications Order, another short-lived initiative, this time in UNESCO, the branch of the United Nations that deals with science, cultural exchange, and information policy, among other subjects.

This paper examines the origin and short life of this initiative within the UN bureaucracy and analyzes how and why it came to be, and how it met its end.  It concludes with some speculative thoughts on why such an organization is needed today, more than ever before, especially in light of new technologies for storing, transmitting and distributing information.

First, a few words are in order about information policy and policy formulation in general. From Rubin’s textbook and Chancellor’s class notes we know that domestically, the federal government determines how information is created, acquired, disseminated, evaluated, and organized in a country through the creation of laws and regulations (Rubin, 2010 and Chancellor, 2013).  Globally, international institutions make a similar determination regarding the range of issues governing information flow across national boundaries, subject to agreement by member states.

Of the several policy formulation models to be considered, Kingdon’s Multiple Streams model provides a robust explanation for how policy is formulated at the international, multilateral level (Cohen-Vogel and McLendon, 2009). Problem, policy and political streams interact and inter-twine.  Policy choices seek issues, problems that exist seek decision-making points where they can insert themselves, solutions are on the lookout for problems for which they may provide an answer, and politicians are ever watchful for issues, projects, and programs that might propel or sustain their careers and positions (Cohen-Vogel & McLendon, 2009).  Information policy formulation at the international level presents a unique example of multiple streams at work.  And the idea of agenda change, prominent in Kingdon’s model, finds unparalleled expression in our discussion.

Historical Perspective

            Two historic, geopolitical forces were set in motion as a result of the allied victory in World War Two: the Cold War between the US and her allies versus the Soviet Bloc; and the process of decolonization of Africa, Asia and Latin America by the European powers – simultaneously East versus West, and North versus South.  In fact, although the U.S. and the then Soviet Union never actually went to war in a traditional sense (hence, the Cold War), they each fought proxy battles through their respective allies in decolonization struggles at several locations.  The importance of information resources and methodologies at play in both these geopolitical conflict sets cannot be overstated, especially in an increasingly technology-oriented world where the wheels of economic development are lubricated, as it were, by the oil of information exchange.

Anthony Smith (1980), in his book, The Geopolitics of Information, wrote,

The collecting, editing, and distribution of information is now a key element in all economies. It is not inaptly that the French have come to speak of the ‘informatisation’ of society; more and more governmental, economic and cultural processes have come to depend upon a set of companies, institutions and systems which make up the information sector and so the tension over the international flow of news has spread across a wide range of concerns which formerly were not conceived as part of this sector.  Changing technology has brought more and more matters into the problem-strewn area of information policy, now subject to this further international wrangle (p. 16).

It was in this environment that legal scholars, information experts, government officials and politicians came together, fresh from the victories of World War Two, to create the United Nations and to adopt a UN General Assembly Resolution 59(1) declaring freedom of information to be “a fundamental human right” (Hajnal, 1983, p. 241).  In 1948, the United Nations Conference on Freedom of Information held further debates on freedom of information and information policy subjects.  In the same year, the member states of the United Nations unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of which states,

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (“Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” “Article #19”).

Moreover, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 contained similar language to that of the Universal Declaration with respect to information policy, but, in addition, couched as a legally binding agreement among states party to the covenant and containing a provision for an international implementation mechanism (Raude-Wilson, 1986, pp. 116-117).  The original Universal Declaration lacked both the legally binding condition and the implementation mechanism, and thus, lacked any true authority under international law (Raude-Wilson, p. 116).

Discussion

            A series of conventions and declarations, put forward in 1952, in 1962, and in 1966 all cleared the path for a 1972 Soviet-sponsored UNESCO resolution calling for guiding principles on the use of satellite broadcasting for the free flow of information.  But it was the Cold War, and the United States, although it didn’t have an absolute veto vote in UNESCO, cast the sole negative vote against the Soviet-sponsored resolution (Hajnal, 1983, p. 244).  The resolution called for prior consent of the receiving nation before receipt of any informational signal.  The official United States position was that the Soviet–sponsored resolution and corresponding insistence on host nation “prior approval” would result in “an abridgment of the universal right to receive and transmit information” (Hajnal, p. 244).  But the Soviets saw it exclusively as a matter of national sovereignty.

In some respects the United States, even though voting against the resolution, took perhaps a more forward-leaning and progressive approach than the consensus position, stating that the resolution “does not put sufficient emphasis on the central importance of the free flow of information and ideas in the modern world” (Nordenstreng, 1980, p. 213).

And on the issue of sovereignty, the U.S. delegation said “in actual practice the sovereignty of States and the unimpeded flow of information and ideas should complement rather than conflict with one another” (Nordenstreng, p. 213).  But the die was cast, and the gulf between the two Cold War powers, even though more symbolic than actual, only continued to widen within the UNESCO framework.

The 19^th session of the UNESCO General Conference in Nairobi (1976) occurred as a culmination of the Non-Aligned Symposium on Information in Tunis, the Ministerial Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in New Delhi, and the 5^th Non-Aligned Summit in Colombo (Gunter, 1978, pp. 44-49, 122-23).  All of the aforementioned non-aligned meetings focused on various aspects of mass media and information policy across member states.  The Mass Media Declaration that resulted emphasized national sovereignty, noninterference, the growing inequality between developed and underdeveloped nations regarding the circulation of information, and the need to achieve a balance in information exchange (Nordenstreng, p. 213). In Nairobi, the United States told the non-aligned countries that it understood their feelings and aspirations and offered interested countries what Kroloff and Cohen referred to as a “Santa’s bag” of development assistance programs and projects, diverting those countries’ attention from the incorporation of mass media and information policy requests clarified in the Mass Media Declaration (Kroloff & Cohen, 1978, p. 31).

But the U.S. offer was just a subterfuge.  In the background, the draft declaration on freedom of information prepared by an intergovernmental group of experts carried with it a draft amendment proposed by the Yugoslavians which equated Zionism with racism (Hajnal, p. 245).  The U.S. found that equation unacceptable, and, along with programs and projects it offered, convinced enough delegations to postpone a vote on the actual declaration and instead, to defer the decision by referring it to a study group (Hajnal, p. 245), which postponed the vote until the next session in 1978.

Another contributing subplot in Nairobi was the growing gap between the African countries and the Arab and Asian countries (Kroloff & Cohen, p. 26).  The Africans, led by then UNESCO Director General Amadou-Mathar M’Bow, from Senegal, were simultaneously upset over African/Arab conflicts in Western Sahara, Chad, and Ethiopia/Somalia, lured by United States offers of programs and projects mentioned above, and disappointed by Arab oil states’ broken promises of financial and developmental assistance.  The Africans voted as a 40-member bloc to delay the vote in Nairobi (Stevenson, 1988, p. 44-45).  The agenda was again shifted.  Late in 1976, Director General M’Bow created the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems and appointed Irish jurist and legal scholar Sean MacBride as its chairman.  One of several papers prepared in 1978 for the Commission, a draft by the Tunisian Secretary of State for Information, Mustapha Masmoudi, more or less coined the term “The New World Information Order.”  In it, Masmoudi delineated political, legal and technico-financial imbalances requiring the creation of a new world order for information (Masmoudi, 1978. pp. 3-10).

Politically, Masmoudi listed the imbalance between two-way flow of information from the developed to the developing countries and vive-versa: he cited the information resource inequality resulting in an absolute monopoly of the news by five major transnational news agencies, all in the developed world; and he highlighted the vestiges of the former colonial system enshrined in the present-day information system through selective reporting (Masmoudi, 1978).  On the legal side, Masmoudi addressed individual and community rights, freedom of information and its corollary, freedom to inform, the right to access information, imbalances in copyrighting practices, and inequities in the distribution of broadcast spectrum and use of satellites and other telecommunications (Masmoudi, 1978).  Technically and financially, he drew attention to the inequities in telecommunications infrastructure, tariffs and taxing structures held over from the colonial era, transport and logistics imbalances and other regional distinctions that put the developing countries at a distinct disadvantage (Masmoudi, 1978).  The focus of the New World Information Order came to be known as the “4 D’s,” democratization (just flows of information and just allocation telecommunications infrastructure), decolonization (cultural identity), demonopolization (regulation of multinational corporations), and development (national communication policy and journalism education) (Carlson, 2003).

UNESCO published MacBride’s final report in 1980, “Many Voices One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order.”  The MacBride report combined information culled from several separate studies, including the Masmoudi draft. It represented a broad consensus of UNESCO’s membership, although the giant superpowers had separate and distinct problems with the language of the final report, centered primarily on the “perceived” anti-commercial bias of the Commission.  (Hajnal, p. 248-249)

The MacBride report was detailed and comprehensive (MacBride, 1980).  By all appearances, the problems, the imbalances, the inequities in information and communications, well-researched and documented, were on track to being addressed at the global level.  But perhaps in keeping with Kingdon’s multiple stream approach to policy formulation, an issue will only gain traction on the policy agenda when the problem stream, the policy stream and the political stream all coincide with a window of opportunity where political entrepreneurs see an opportunity to move forward their personal agenda (Cohen-Vogel and McLendon, 2013).  But the necessary coincidence of the aforementioned streams with a window of opportunity was not to be in this case.

Several environmental factors contributed to the postponement and eventual removal from the UNESCO agenda of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) initiative.  The U.S. and the U.K. both opposed the final text of the MacBride report and even threatened to withdraw from UNESCO.  The UNESCO director general, sensing pressure from external criticisms of mismanagement and corrupt practices within UNESCO, attempted to appease his critiques by postponing a vote on adoption of the MacBride findings (Preston, W.  1989).  Concern about heightened tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union resulting from the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan diverted much of the attention of the New World World Information Order’s strongest advocates.  An evolution within UNESCO itself, resulting in a dilution of attention to the thony issues of information policy and an increase focus on easy-to-understand and agree upon programs of assistance and development also diverted attention.  Finally, the early 1980’s saw a general weakening of the Non-Aligned Movement, the strongest bloc of support for the NWICO (Carlsson, 2003).  By 1985, the United States had withdrawn from UNESCO altogether and the New World Information Order had disappeared from UNESCO’s annual conference agenda.

Conclusions

            Ronald Diebert wrote that the world of international politics was being transformed by the advent of high tech telecommunications, which he referred to as the “hypermedia environment” (Diebert, 1997, p. IX).   Medium theory, first articulated by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (who was to have been the Canadian representative to the 1980 MacBride Commission until illness prevented his travel), sought to explain the evolutionary path to hypermedia by examining the effects of different modes of communication on the way information was stored, transmitted and distributed at different times in history.  For example, changes in the human vocal tract and development of the spoken word resulted in a great leap forward in human development over 35,000 years ago; the invention of writing accompanied the development of the first civilizations along the Nile and in the Tigris Euphrates Valley; the development of the Alphabet accompanied the Greek enlightenment; and development of printing and movable type occurred simultaneously with the Renaissance and modernity as we know it (Diebert, pp. 1-3).  One can speculate that the development of a global information and communication order, similar to what was attempted in UNESCO in the 1970’s, may well be the necessary and sufficient condition for peace between the nations of the world.

Since reading this Blainey (1973) passage over thirty years ago, I have found it to be haunting:

A pioneer of sociology, Georg Simmel, while lecturing in philosophy at berlin in 1904,set out a sad truth about international relations. He argued that the most effective way of preventing a war was to possess exact knowledge of the comparative strength of the two rival nations or alliances.  And this exact knowledge, he wrote, ‘is often attainable only by actual fighting out the conflict.’ (Blainey, p. 118)

Imagine if the nations of the world, all the sub-groupings, all the regional alliances could agree to adopt a global information policy, that, among other things, promoted transparency about military strength in each country.  Perhaps humankind could then attain the world peace we claim we seek, without engaging in conflict.  Without putting too strong a spin on it, it may be that the New International Information and Communication Order proposed by UNESCO in the 70’s was on this path.  We can only speculate.

A report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) in 1977 (when the new information policy was being considered) begins, “Whether we like it or not, there will be a ‘New World Information Order’” (Kroloff and Cohen, 1977. p. 1).  Today, with new technologies for creating, acquiring, disseminating, evaluating, and organizing information, globally and practically instantaneously, we must acknowledge that we already have a new world information order in operation, in fact, we have several orders, several overlapping global orders.  But these global information orders are not governed nor held accountable by states or international organizations like the UN or UNESCO, nor even by the superpowers like the United States, Russia, China, or the European Union.  They are governed by multinational corporations like Google, and single government agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), and regional and global communications networks like CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

That same SFRC report ends, “Today the computer is vaguely considered a factor in the “New World Information Order.”  Tomorrow it could be the factor.” (Kroloff and Cohen, 1978, p. 38).  The writers of that report could not have been more prescient.

References

Blainey, G.  (1973). The Causes of War. New York: The Free Press.

Buckland, M.  (1997). What is a “Document”?  Journal of the American Society for Information    Science 48 9.  pp. 804-809.  Retrieved from https://blackboard.cua.edu.

Carlsson, U.  (2003). The Rise and Fall of the NWICO.  Nordicom.  Goteborg University. Retrieved from www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/32_031-068.pdf

Chancellor, R.  (2013). Information Policy, Copyright & Intellectual Property Law.  Retrieved      from https://blackboard.cua.edu.

Cohen-Vogel, L. and McLendon, M.  (2009). Multiple Streams.  Retrieved from http://politicalframes.wikispaces.com/Multiple+Streams.

Diebert, R.  (1997). Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia. Communication in World Order Transformation.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Gunter, J.  (1978). The United States and the Debate on the World “Information Order.”

Washington, DC: Academy for Educational Development, Inc.

Hajnal, P.  (1983). Guide to UNESCO.  New York: Oceana Publications.

MacBride, S.  (1980). Many Voices, One World: Communication and Society Today and   Tomorrow.  New York: UNESCO.

Masmoudi, M.  (1978). The New World Information Order.  Retrieved from             www.unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0003/000340/034010EB.pdf.

Nordenstreng, K and H. Schiller.  (1980). National Sovereignty and International   Communications.  Norward, NJ: ABlex Publishing Company.

Preston, W. Herman, E. and Schiller, H. (1989).  Hope and Folly: The United States and    UNESCO 1945-1985.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Raube-Wilson, S.  (1986). The New World Information and Communication Order andInternational Human Rights Law, 9 B.C. Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 107 (1986),

Retrieved from: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol9/iss1/5

Rubin, R.  (2010)  Foundations of Library and Information Science.  New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.

Smith, A.  1980.  The Geopolitics of Information.  New York: Oxford University Press.

The Critical Infrastructure Protection Board (CIPB) established during the Bush II administration is an inter-agency entity charged with creating and implementing a national strategy to protect and “contain” the critical information infrastructure across a number of foreign affairs related agencies (Rubin, 2010). On the surface, that sounds rather benign, and even rather technical, because it sounds like it pertains to machines that carry the information, not the information itself.
However, at the agency level, the existence of the CIPB is a bit troublesome. In terms of information policy, the ALA (American Library Association) and other agencies have a very well-founded fear regarding the potential and/or effects of the CIPB to withdraw or restrict government information that may have been otherwise available to the public (Rubin, 2010, p. 325). Especially, or perhaps even more significantly, the CIPB creates the potential for an information “detour,” i.e., the withdrawal or restriction of information that should be available to Congressional committees who are charged with oversight of the operations of those organizations, such as Homeland Security, State, FBI, IRS, etc.
In the wrong hands, the CIPB allows for the creation of a “cloak of secrecy” within an agency that provides for limited collection and destruction of information that might prove detrimental to that agency’s political leadership, a climate of secrecy that cannot be penetrated by Congressional committees who represent the American people, in a broad sense. The ALA 2003 report mentioned in Rubin is precisely on point in this regard.
Here is a link to the ALA report: http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Resolution_on_restrictions_on_access_to_government_information



Constructivism, Accountable Talk, Conversation Theory, and Information Literacy Instruction 

Introduction

            This paper sets forth constructivism and a constructive approach as the best solution for information literacy instruction.  Many have already made that argument and made it convincingly.  What is different in this paper is my attempt to make the case that using deliberative discourse, also called accountable talk (pioneered at University of Pittsburg), is an excellent way to move forward the constructivist paradigm for learning.   Briefly, I will put a sharper point on the case I have made with a review of Pask’s conversation theory, and its latest disciple, David Lankes.  Finally, I will use two examples not related to information literacy instruction to illustrate the potential comprehensiveness of this approach.

A Constructivist Approach

Cooperstein and Kocevar-Weidinger (2003) convincingly explain the generally agreed upon elements of constructivist learning, i.e., learners “construct” meaning by making a deliberate attempt at sense-making of incoming information; learners “build” new information on top of old information, finding connections between the two; learners share and compare ideas and learn through the resolution of conflicting ideas; and learning happens through classroom activities that imitate and emulate activities in the real world (Cooperstein & Kocevar, p. 142).  The first two elements operate inside the learner and occur inside the mind.  Of the second two elements, the third is more socially oriented, i.e., accomplished through interactions with others, and thus, within our power to control, and the fourth is pretty much dependent on the strength and creativity of the teacher or instructor.  My focus, then, is on the third element.

Vygotsky (1966) describes how a child reaches his hand out to grasp an object that he sees but that is beyond his reach.  That reaching appears to surrounding people to be a pointing, though it may not be, it may just be a hand “hanging in the air.”  But the nature of the thing changes, from being an extended reach, to becoming a signal to surrounding people.  Vygotsky says the “child is the last to realize his own gesture” and concludes that “we become ourselves through others” (Vygotsky, p. 39).  This begins a very social way of interacting with and learning from others.  Expanded, Cooperstein and Kocevar-Weidinger claim that “an important aspect of constructivism is the need for social interaction” and that “group activity increases discussion, experimentation, enthusiasm, and participation (Cooperstein and Kocevar-Weidinger, p. 144).”

Constructivism works well in information literacy instruction settings for several reasons.  Grassian (2009) explains that the cognitive/constructivist model helps the learner “own” the material through active involvement, emphasizes collaborative learning, and allows for differing hypotheses that encourages development of a learning community (Grassian, p. 50-51).  Information literacy skills, like conducting searches or evaluating web documents, all lend themselves to learning that depends on cognitive activity, on thinking about discrete steps in a process, on brainstorming trial answers to a series of questions, and on sharing and comparing those trial answers to discover the best outcome or the most satisfactory information solution.

Accountable Talk/Deliberative Discourse

Accountable Talk, a conversation methodology pioneered at the University of Pittsburg, focuses on establishing group norms that simultaneously support rigorous inquiry and promote equity and access (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2007).  Most experiments in Accountable Talk have occurred with children, but information literacy instruction groups at high school or college age would make a good experimentation model.  The authors at Pitt developed Accountable Talk from a Vygotskian theoretical framework emphasizing the importance of social interaction in developing thought processes that raise the level of discourse (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, p. 285).  By asking for clarification, through polite challenges, and by encouraging participation by all participants, the conversation itself spurs students to think more deeply, more carefully and more critically.

The “accountable” of Accountable Talk refers to levels or areas of accountability to which students (participants) are held.  While involved in conversations, students are held accountable to the learning community of which each is a part.  They must listen to each other, both to show respect, and to carefully assess what is being said so they can use and build on it.  Students are held accountable to accurate knowledge, i.e., they are responsible for their claims’ accuracy and truth.  Finally, students are held responsible to standards of rigorous and critical thinking.   These levels of accountability, along with the other group norms, would combine together to create a rich and creative environment for students in an interdisciplinary information literacy course.

Conversation Theory

Conversation Theory is in large part an extension and an amplification of Accountable Talk, although it predates Accountable Talk.  At the least, both derive from similar roots in the Vygotskian approach mentioned earlier in this paper.  Gordon Pask first developed it.  I will present below David Lankes’ moderated interpretation.

Lankes (2011) says a conversation has four parts: conversants, either people, or political parties, or even countries; a language, a set of meanings going back and forth; agreements, shared understandings between the conversants, arrived at through the language; and an entailment mesh, a collection and relation of the agreements (Lankes, p. 221).  Conversation may begin in a basic way, as a series of directions or instructions, simple exchanges.  One conversant may be a lot less knowledgeable than the other, but the exchange of these basic instructional directions builds a shared framework of common understanding.  Gordon Pask identified this stage as the initial stage of conversation (Lankes, p. 221).  After numerous exchanges at this level, if one of the conversants makes assertions that the other must agree to, over several iterations several agreements (or agreements not to agree) will be established, which may spawn different conversations.  This would be the second level (Lankes, p. 221).  Both conversants are now involved in learning, about each other, about their respective tastes and preferences and interests. Third level (Lankes, p. 222).  Once a collection of these agreements is established and stored in a memory file or a book, it will achieve what Pask and Lankes would call the fourth level, or entailment mesh (Lankes, p. 222).   At each level, new knowledge and new information are being formed and developed, in a constructivist way.

Conclusion

Last year I took a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, also called ModPo.  There were over 40,000 students in the course.  It was hosted by University of Pennsylvania, and live webcasts were broadcasted once a week, to which all participants were invited.  The professor used a team-teaching approach, and several videos each week featured close reads of poems with the professor at a table conversing with six teaching assistants.  The conversation was led by various team members at various times.  Each lecture was a conversation between the seven of them, piped out to over 40,000 students around the world.  The course was a grand success.  We learned the material, and a large percentage actually got certificates of completion.  In Washington, a dozen or so of us formed a weekly study group that met on Sundays at Politics and Prose Bookstore.  This year the course is being taught with the addition of some twenty community teaching assistants, embedded throughout the population of online students.  Perhaps such a model of conversation- and team-led instruction might be conceivable for information literacy instruction on a smaller level.

The final example is an information interview I conducted with Max McClellan, one of the producers of the highly regarded, award-winning news program, 60 Minutes.  One thing that the producer said made a very strong impression on me.  He said all interviews on 60 Minutes are conversations, the kind of conversation that anyone could imagine having in his/her own living room.  He said it was through conversations, going back and forth, that new information was developed, and it was through conversation that new knowledge was best imparted (M. McClellan, personal communication, August 16, 2013).

Both examples highlight the use of conversation as an instructional vehicle/mechanism.  Information literacy instruction might be ripe for the inclusion of more talk in the various methodologies already in use to convey and impart knowledge.

References

Cooperstein, S. E., & Kocevar-Weidinger, E. (2004). Beyond active learning: A constructivist approach to learning. Reference Services Review, 32(2), 141-148.

Grassian, E. S., & Kaplowitz, J. R. (2009). Information literacy instruction. Theory and Practice, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York.  

Lankes, R. D. (2011). The atlas of new librarianship MIT Press Cambridge, MA.

Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283-297.

Vygotsky, L. (1991). 3 genesis of the higher mental functions. Learning to Think, 2, 32.

Institutional Repositories, Wikileaks, and the Network Age

Institutional Repositories, Wikileaks, and the Network Age

Introduction

In this paper, I will first define institutional repositories and evaluate and assess how diplomatic information, correspondence, and memoranda might fit into that definition.  Then I will trace the evolution of the mandate within our government to increase sharing of information across agencies, precipitated by the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission Report. Just briefly I will mention society’s transformation from the Information Age to the Network Age and its impact on information sharing. Following a short review of selected elements of forensics in digital librarianship, I will hypothesize how all these forces converged, resulting in the Wikileaks release of sensitive, classified information to public media outlets. I will conclude with thoughts about the public interest and information governance within the framework of access to government information.

Institutional repositories defined

Institutional repositories, defined generically by Crow (2002) as “digital collections that provide access to the intellectual output of an institutional community,” is a term seldom applied to the extensive information holdings of a nation’s foreign affairs and national security superstructure. But let us face the facts. First, the Department of State, one foreign affairs agency among many, receives thousands of classified reporting cables per month originating from embassies and consulates throughout the world, distributed to U.S. embassies in nearby countries with a need to know, disseminated throughout the foreign affairs establishment in Washington and, in many cases, shared with close foreign allies. Second, hundreds of thousands of government historical documents, diplomatic telegrams, memoranda, etc., are maintained in chronological order for ultimate de-classification and/or for distribution to the public upon request under the Freedom of Information Act. Third, the Department of State Ralph Bunche Library, the oldest library in the Federal Depository Library system, (established by then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1789) holds 400,000 print volumes and several thousand e-books, along with access to numerous electronic databases (http://fdlp.gov/home/repository/doc_view/2167-us-state-department).

Yeates (2003) provides a similarly applicable definition of institutional repository. “An institutional repository is the collective intellectual output of an institution recorded in a form that can be preserved and exploited…repositories are key to the ability of institutions to respond to future needs for more dynamic cross-boundary communications services” (Yeates, 2003). One important drawback of institutional repositories cited by Yeates is reliance on unproven methods for long term digital preservation.  We will come back to that later.

One may conclude, then, that while not commonly considered as such (in large part, I suspect, because most often institutional repositories are considered in the academic environment exclusively), the extensive information holdings of the Department of State (DOS) may and should qualify as an institutional repository. Moreover, it is not without precedent that a non-academic organizational body would adopt the institutional repository designation, especially if attached directly to a research-type institution. As one example, Romary and Armbruster describe a decision by the European Commission, in conjunction with the European Research Council, to create an institutional repository (Romary & Armbruster, 2010).

9-11 Commission mandates information sharing

Chapter 13 of the 9-11 Commission Report calls for a different way of organizing government in wake of the terrorist attack on New York City (Kean, 2011). Specifically, it cites information sharing failures that may have prevented analysts and intelligence specialists from “connecting the dots” in advance and thereby averting the terrorist attack.  Various pieces of information, for example, about the attackers and about their presence in the United States existed in various databases, for our purposes, in various institutional repositories across government, but the information was not shared across agencies. The report made the following two recommendations:

“Information procedures should provide incentives for sharing, to restore a better balance between security and shared knowledge,” and

“The president should lead the government-wide effort to bring the major national security institutions into the information revolution. He should coordinate the resolution of the legal, policy, and technical issues across agencies to create a “trusted information network.”

Agencies, including the DOS and the Department of Defense (DOD), in response to these recommendations, immediately sought ways, technologies, and methodologies to achieve the recommended intra-government information sharing that had previously been non-existent at worst and insufficient at best. While the Ashcroft memorandum, released immediately after the 9/11 attack, was a knee-jerk response designed to restrict public access to sensitive information (Uhl, 2004), bi-annual GAO reports track steps taken within government to improve information sharing across agencies (Walker, 2004). And as in most cases involving government bureaucracy, efforts and responses occur in a sporadic and uneven fashion.

SIPRnet opens the door to information sharing 

The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, also known as SIPRnet, had been known in military circles as the way the DOD distributed sensitive information on its various computer systems (Weinberger, 2010). Largely in response to the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission Report, access to SIPRnet was expanded to include more members of the military, the intelligence community and overseas-stationed employees and contractors of DOD, DHS, and DOS. BBC reported that at the time of the Wikileaks theft, over 2.5 million civilian and military members had access to SIPRnet (BBC, 2010). Meanwhile, State developed its own repository of diplomatic communications, called the Netcentric Diplomacy Initiative, which allowed the sharing of its documents with and the hosting of its documents on SIPRnet. Connection to and sharing with SIPRnet in effect expanded the size State’s institutional repository by a logarithmic proportion. At this point, military members with access to SIPRnet also had open access to tens of thousands of diplomatic telegrams from U.S. embassies around the world. To date, as a response to the Wikileaks release of classified telegrams, State’s Netcentric Diplomacy Initiative has suspended its access to DOD’s SIPRnet (Hoover, 2012). State plans to have in place sometime in 2014 a metadata tagging system that will allow cataloging and retrieval of data from its vast repository of diplomatic telegrams but that capability does not exist at present.

Simultaneously, the big intra-governmental push to share information also harkened the requirement for government to “join the information revolution” (Kean, 2011). However, by the time of the attacks of 9/11, social theorists had already postulated one year previously the transference from the information age to the network age, “one which goes beyond primarily content in the form of data to also embrace distribution infrastructure, data management and the linkages between content producers and consumers” (Brevini, Hintz, & McCurdy, 2013).  The idea of the network society also speaks to the role of the institutional repository in the evolution of government information systems.  While the Information Age gave rise to new ways of information generation, managing and dissemination through the use of new technologies (Paul, 2012), the Network Age broke the great power and sovereign state monopolies on information of the prior Information Age through the creation of media and social networks with expanded power and reach (Brevini, Hintz,& McCurdy, p. 89). There also appears to be a correlation between the evolution from Information Age to Network Age and the evolution of Web consumers and downloaders in Web 1.0, to Web producers and uploaders in Web 2.0.

Digital decay opens the door to leakages

This information-rich environment might have remained the exclusive domain of trusted military and diplomatic operators. Data security measures in place and information security (INFOSEC) incentives might have been sufficient to regulate control of sensitive material.  But there was one unplanned-for element, unanticipated digital decay.

Again, the language and vocabulary of institutional repositories holds explanatory power.  Long term preservation of digital information seems a foregone conclusion. We believe that electronic data will remain, will retain its format, and will always be there in storage to serve us, like hieroglyphs carved on the walls of ancient Egyptian temple ruins. Robert Fox (2011), in “Forensics of digital librarianship,” disabuses us of false notions of digital permanence by explaining causes of digital decay, some of which are quite relevant to the present discussion (Fox, 2011). Enumerating possible causes of digital decay, Fox considers the following: neglect, where improper handling or exposure degrades media quality; file glut, where files are securely stored but in a disorganized or not well thought out manner, making it nearly impossible to retrieve relevant digital data; corruption, where flipped data bits, failure of storage systems, and human error lead to file corruption; hardware failure, disasters, backup failures, disc failures, and human error result in data loss; and obsolete formats, where obsolescence results from proprietary formats, defunct vendors, formats requiring special, obsolete hardware and/or obsolete storage media (Fox, p. 266). Most significant among these causes of digital decay, and most relevant to our discussion of the Wikileaks release to public media of classified data, is the concept of file glut. In the case of Wikileaks, file glut didn’t specifically corrupt the records and the data, but it corrupted the process by which records were retrieved and transported to the degree that a low ranking soldier was able to burn copies of sensitive and classified material to DVD’s without his supervisor or anyone in his chain of command taking notice.

Summary and conclusions

The elements in place were the following: a foreign affairs agency with an institutional repository that doesn’t call it one; a mandate, following a vicious terrorist attack, to share information across agencies; the transformation from the Information Age to the Network Age that expanded the power and reach of social and media networks beyond and outside the power of the sovereign state; and file glut, resulting in decay of digital material due to improper organization of digital files and subsequent poor supervision of the process of retrieving and copying highly classified documents. The question is less of why did Wikileaks happen when it did, and more of why something like Wikileaks didn’t happen sooner and/or why it hasn’t happened again?

We cannot have a discussion about government information without a discussion about transparency, the public interest, and the public’s right to know or have access to information that affects them, in short, that provides for an informed public which is necessary in a democracy. In the United States, the right of the public to information about their government is enshrined in the Constitution and the nation’s laws. The Freedom of Information Act, enacted in 1966, was the first federal law that established the legal right of access to government information (Uhl, 2004). Unfortunately, the Ashcroft memo immediately following the 9-11 attacks not only curtailed access to information, but strengthened the government’s ability to restrict access and gave a blanket FOIA exemption to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (Uhl, pp. 267-269).  There has been, arguably, a constant erosion of FOIA enforcement since the 9-11 attacks.  Insofar as the repository in question is a repository for the American people, this restriction on access is a negative. But perhaps it is a repository not for the American people, but exclusively for the practitioners of foreign policy. In that case, the public access restriction is a different thing altogether. We have to define the stakeholders.

Who are the stakeholders in this information repository? And who are the shareholders? In other words, who has the greatest right to the information resources managed by government agencies, the government itself, or the people who elect and are represented by their government leaders? Embedded in that question is an equally interesting one: who within government has the greatest, or strongest claim on information resources created and developed by government agencies, the executive or the legislative leadership? It all comes down, basically, to a question of information governance and management of the information transaction space. Kooper, Maes and Lindgreen (2011) describe information governance as “focusing on the seeking and finding, creation and use, and the exchange of information, not solely on its production,” and they view information governance as “a framework to optimize the value of information in some sense to the actors involved” (Kooper, Maes & Lingreen, 2011). They describe the actors involved as 1) the creator of the information, 2) the receiver of the information, and 3) the governing actor. i.e., the actor who regulates the interaction between the creator and the receiver. In our case, that would include the government as creator, the public as receiver (with an implicit requirement for government transparency), and the leakers (and perhaps the press who transmitted the leaked information) as the governing actor. The pertinent question one may raise, however, is how could better or stronger information governance have informed the actors and prevented Wikileaks from happening in the first place, or mitigated its effects once it occurred?

A fuller analysis of these three actors awaits a different paper in perhaps a different subject matter area. In our role as information professionals, our work laying the problem out in these terms, i.e., defining the institutional repository space (and even naming it as such), explaining the information policy roles (as there are numerous information policy applications at work), and setting forth the information governance aspects contributes significantly to a deeper understanding of the problems that exist and facilitates their solution in a complete and interdisciplinary way. Our work done, we pass it on to other professionals, safe in the knowledge that the completion of our tasks, as information professionals, made a vital contribution to the overall discourse.

References

Brevini, B., Hintz, A., & McCurdy, P. (2013). Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the future of communications, journalism and society. Palgrave Macmillan.

Crow, R. (2002). The case for institutional repositories: A SPARC position paper. ARL Bimonthly Report 223.

Fox, R. (2011). Forensics of digital librarianship. OCLC Systems & Services, 27(4), 264-271.

Hoover, J. Nicholas. “InformationWeek: State Department CIO: What’s Changed Since Wikileaks.” InformationWeek. N.p., 5 Apr. 2012. Web. 06 Oct. 2013. <http://www.informationweek.com/government/security/state-department-cio-whats-changed-since/232800365&gt.

Kean, T. (2011). The 9/11 commission report: Final report of the national commission on terrorist attacks upon the United States Government Printing Office.

Kooper, M., Maes, R., & Lindgreen, E. (2011). On the governance of information: Introducing a new concept of governance to support the management of information. International Journal of Information Management, 31(3), 195-200.

Romary, L., & Armbruster, C. (2009). Beyond institutional repositories. Available at SSRN 1425692.

“Siprnet: Where the Leaked Cables Came from.” BBC News. BBC, 29 Nov. 2010. Web. 07 Oct. 2013. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618?print=true>.

Uhl, K. E. (2003). Freedom of information act post-9/11: Balancing the public’s right to know, critical infrastructure protection, and homeland security. Am.UL Rev., 53, 261.

Walker, D. M. (2004). 9/11 Commission Report. Reorganization, Transformation, and Information Sharing.

Weinberger, Sharon. “What Is SIPRNet?” PopularMechanics.com. N.p., 1 Dec. 2010. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.

Yeates, R. (2003). Institutional repositories. Vine, 33(2), 96-101

More to come: a librarian reads Giroux…#MOOCMOOC

I plowed through the Giroux chapter last night and it made my knees hurt, as they always do when I walk in an ever-tightening circle. Reading Maha Bali’s cliff notes this morning was refreshing, however, and my knees are feeling better already.

Cliff’s notes of Giroux’s Chapter #moocmooc

Thank you. I found the Freire and hooks readings a lot more revealing, a lot more enlightening, but that is surely attributable to my lusophone and African-American heritage. Maha Bali’s mention at the end of her notes on the “multiplicity of views” challenging the grand narrative brought to mind an essay I once read on multiple working hypotheses, which can be found here: http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/chamberlin.php. Hope to blog more in the next couple of days.

more later (including an after-action report on my morning library instruction workshop.

Workshop went well.  Sophomores.  10 minutes of instruction and 45 minutes in the stacks carrying out assigned tasks.  I didn’t force them to form groups as with the freshmen, but definitely firmly suggested it, empowering them to make the decision.  Most saw the utility of working in groups but we did have one “lone wolf.”  Further, each team was assigned the complete list of scenarios.

For most, the content of the exercises was as interesting as the process of conducting the search.  Students were creative, in fact, innovative in their execution.  I encouraged teams to exchange information with other teams when they found themselves “lost,” and to cross check their searches with Google searches to uncover additional search terms (pearl- growing method).

Moving from group to group, I stressed to students the several aspects of the scenarios, for example, that the A&T Four were all freshmen, or that North Carolina’s education system was ranked near the best of the nation following the Sanford reforms.  It clicked with them at various levels, which was “self-actualizing” for them as well as for me.

It was also interesting the way the groups did or did not implement a division of labor to cover all six scenarios.  The class required that each person post a summary to findings to Blackboard, and in retrospect, it may have worked better had we required each team to post summaries, as a group.  At a minimum it would have avoided the mad rush of students copying notes from teammates at the end of class.

Back to Giroux.  I underlined (in pencil) passages I wanted to recall, but I put check marks in the margins of passages I definitely wanted to remember.  What follows are paraphrased summaries of the margin-checked ideas:

1.  Critical pedagogy is only relevant if it addresses “real social needs,” is “imbued with a passion for democracy,” and “provides the conditions for expanding democratic forms of political and social agency.” p.74

2.  Critical pedagogy requires “an ongoing indictment ‘of those forms of truth-seeking which imagined themselves to be and placelessly valid’” (Gilroy, 2000). p. 75

3.  Critical educators should be aware of and “attentive to the ethical dimensions of their own practice,” especially regarding their encouragement of critical reflection and moral and civic agency. p. 76

4.  “Rather than providing students with an opportunity to learn how to shape and govern public life, education is increasingly being vocationalized, reduced to a commodity that provides privileges for a few students and industrial training for the service sector for the rest, especially those who are marginalized by reason of their class or race.’  p. 78

5.  Educators should 1) resist “attempts on the part of liberals or conservatives to reduce the role of teacher to that of either technicians or corporate pawns,” and 2) refuse “attempts to reduce classroom teaching exclusively to matters of technique and method.”

6.  “Critical pedagogy must: 1) be interdisciplinary and radically contextual, 2) engage the complex relationships between power and knowledge, 3) critically address the institutional constraints under which teaching takes place, and 4) focus on how students can engage the imperatives of critical social citizenship.”

Well, as you can imagine, there are plenty opportunities for this level of critical pedagogy in information literacy and library instruction.  Content hand in hand with process and method, variety and diversity in examples, cognitively and culturally, and providing students the option to make their own decisions, hew their own paths, and respond responsibly to the outcomes.