A Graduate Student's Blog

Moved

2008-10-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

I have moved to wordpress. http://agraduatestudent.wordpress.com/

Is there no balm in Gilead?

2008-03-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Jer. 8:22. "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?"

One of the advantages that I have from my Seminary training is an understanding and appreciation for the bible. But of course, as a Rationalist, my appreciation only goes so far; in as much as the bible contains wisdom, I am for it, while at the same time being restrained by reason to be honest about its ugliness. That said, I think that there is something beautiful and transcendent about the verse I quote here.

The passage is an interesting gem of wisdom concerning a person’s desperate "crying" for the health his people. The first two questions are interpreted as rhetorical and are followed by a question that implies a positive answer to those rhetorical questions—in other words: “Yes, there is a balm. Yes, there is a physician. Therefore, why is there so much sickness among my people?”

I challenge you to take this passage as a metaphor concerning the state of health access in the United States. Persons like me lament the fact that in what is arguably the wealthiest nation in the West people are forced to make decisions regarding their health based on their financial situation when there are resources in abundance.

You might think that I am talking about health care for the sick and rebut me by saying that people can and do access Emergency Room care at other people’s expense when they are sick. But you would be wrong; I am not suggesting that the poor and sick do not have access to healthcare; they certainly do in most cases, even when they cannot pay.

But rather, what I am lamenting is the fact that the working poor often do not have access to the right kinds of food that promote and sustain “the health of… my people.”

It is a fact that in the United States food cost is that part of the budget that is flexible in a context of several other monthly “static” bills that cannot be negotiated such as the rent, utilities, car payments, etc. What can be adjusted, and often is, is the money spent on food.

The consequence of this societal curiosity among the working poor was dealt with by David K. Shipler in his book The Working Poor. The anecdotes that he retells are the stories of pediatricians who are overwhelmed by cases of babies who “fail to thrive” because they are born into families who can pay the rent, but cannot afford to pay for nutritional food for their offspring.

This problem is directly connected to policy regarding the whole ideal “poverty” in the United States. Federal Poverty guidelines are benchmarked against food costs, or what a basket of “basic” (i.e. non-healthy) food costs rather than what has become the number one cost American consumers have in the contemporary economy: housing.

What this means for the working poor is that in order to not be homeless, one has to buy and eat cheap food, cheap formula, go on public assistance (whatever is left thanks for the reactionary Right), etc.

This one issue, I think, exasperates the disparate problems around “the health of my people” and it is a problem that can be addressed simply by bench marking federal poverty guidelines to housing and/or creating a minimum wage benchmarked to the same (as opposed to benchmarking it to absolutely nothing but the whim of Congress as is now the case).

What do you think? Take a look at the Center for Public Policy Priority’s Family Budget Estimator and see if you could make it in Texas (keep in mind Texas’ cost of living is much lower than some places):

http://www.cppp.org/fbe/

http://universallivingwage.org/

The Working Poor, Shipler
Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich

2008-03-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Zubok, Vladislav and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War. Harvard University Press: Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996. 346 pp.

The authors of Inside the Kremlin's War are Russian academics. Both studied at the Institute for the US and Canada Studies of the Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and have become influential scholars in the United States because of their perspective and charm; Zubok has even become a regular commentator on CNN's Cold War programming. This background gives the book a unique place in the historiography of the Cold War as their treatment of the leaders mirrors their own experience. For example, it is hard to imagine an U.S. American-born would include language to suggests that “Khrushchev was the last 'true believer' in the mandate of the Bolshevik Revolution among the post-Stalin generation of leaders,” which seems to suggest that the ideological framework (at least philosophically) of the violent overthrow of Bourgeois World governments was still valid to Khrushchev-- an idea that many would consider patently wrong (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 178). Nevertheless, this distinctively non-Western understanding of Cold War leaders in the Kremlin is part of their heritage.

Zubok and Pleshakov grew up in the Soviet Union and graduated from Moscow State University in the early 1980s. After that, they studied at the Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies where they both began to understand the intricacies of Soviet Policy making, filtering it through the lens of their cultural upbringing. During their studies they had access to much of the new material that was becoming available to scholars as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Because of this unique course of study the scholars developed a key explanatory thesis to guide understanding of Soviet foreign policy in the Cold War: a “revolutionary-imperial paradigm”: "The imperial implications of both Marxist thought and Russian history provide the broad background and context for understanding Soviet involvement in the Cold War" (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 3). Each Soviet leader is dealt with in the context of this paradigm, which from leader to leader, is upheld to various degrees. Stalin becomes the champion of this paradigm after he succeeds Lenin. In fact, Stalin is the most profound exemplar of this “Marxist-Imperial Revolutionary” paradigm, according to Zubok and Pleshakov. Nevertheless, one might wonder why Lenin and the last Czar did not find a more substantive place in the text because an in-depth look at the training that Stalin received under these two governments might add depth to the curious mix of brutal authoritarianism, security concerns, personality, and Marxist ideology that the authors attempt to place squarely on the shoulder of Stalin. If Zubok and Pleshakov had offered more of a look at Stalin's tutors the implications of their thesis paradigm would be more obvious.

Still, when it comes to the reign of Joseph Stalin, the imperial-revolutionary paradigm is compelling. In the early years of the Cold War the allies were looking for a way to continue the Grand Alliance which was integral to the defeat of Nazi Germany and peace in Europe. Stalin was at the helm of the Soviet Union for the entire war and was the benefit of U.S. American wartime aid. After the war it quickly became apparent to the West that a similar post-war relationship with Stalin's Soviet Union would be impossible. Zubok and Pleshakov posit that Stalin with his “symbiosis of imperial expansionism and ideological proselytism” was unable to work with the Western powers, though he wanted to for his own reasons (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 3).

The authors argue that Stalin reached out to the West on several occasions. For instance, they state, “In 1943-1946, Stalin... nurtured [a] vision of a realpolitik partnership with the Western Allies,” hence his cold reaction to the Chinese revolution at first (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 56-57). Thus, the argument that Zubok and Pleshakov seem to be making is that although Stalin wanted to find a way to work peacefully with the West, his ideological position made it literally impossible-- an example of how ideology features prominently in modern Cold War historiography.

The men that stood by Stalin during his tenure as “Boss” of the Soviet Union were Molotov and Zhadanov. Each of these leaders had a specific role in shoring-up the rule of their leader and mentor, Joseph Stalin. Molotov was Stalin's foreign diplomat and Zhadanov was his propaganda chief. The stories of these men, although interesting, boil down to their role as an extension of Stalin's authoritarian power. On the subject of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Molotov is said to have “had the authority to sign any document with Hitler on the spot, but his cable to Stalin suggested that any deal on spheres of influence be delayed until the German minister... came to Moscow” (Zubok and Pleshakov. p. 79). Clearly here, and other places in the text, Zubok and Pleshakov argue that Molotov was serving as an agent of Stalin, the personification of the Soviet Union at the time. In fact, Molotov was so committed to his role as servant to Stalin that even after his wife was charged, arrested, and sent to a gulag, he remained a faithful protector of the Stalin foreign policy legacy until his death.

Andrie Alexandrovich Zhdanov was Stalin's other man, the “mouthpiece of the of [Stalin's] new worldview that turned the iron curtain into a tragic reality for many millions to the east of the Elbe river” (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 111-112). These two leaders, at least from the perspective of Zubok and Pleshakov, served as the “faceless politicians” and “valets of the master” (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 137).

After the death of Stalin a new wave of leadership vied for the throne of the Kremlin. Thus, the authors' ideological explanations take a more pragmatic turn. After the Boss's death, two leaders took temporary charge. These leaders, Beria and Malenkov, came to power just as the Soviets were able to test their first nuclear bomb. The authors view their short rule and policies as being influenced by the fact of nuclear bi-polarity with the United States. In an interesting chapter of the book, which Zubok and Pleshakov entitled “Learning to Love The Bomb,” the authors make the case that both of these leaders became interested in change after the death of Stalin (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 139). Nevertheless, change for the two Soviet apparatchiks had more to do with the changes that were already going on in the Soviet Union because of the introduction of the “super weapon” to their military arsenal than with the “liberalization” and “de-Stalinization” that would take place under Khrushchev. Under Stalin, Beria and Malenkov “benefited from Stalin's great purges” and rose to become chiefs of the Soviet Union's large military-industrial programs: atomic, missiles, and air defense (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 141-142). Apparently, this is the fundamental reason why Zubok and Pleshakov believe that these men were able to seize power after the death of Stalin; Stalin was dead, the nation had just gotten the bomb, and the leadership who administered the atomic program were in the strongest national position.

Where Beria and Malenkov sought to establish a new technocratic elite, Khrushchev was more of a leader of the people, the Party, and a statesman with a real understanding of the nature of nuclear bi-polarity and what it meant for Bolshevik revolutionary goals. Largely more ideological than his temporary predecessors, Khrushchev led that party and the Soviet nation into a new phase of the Cold War which would lead to the “long peace” with the West. Khrushchev came to power, underestimated by his political adversaries, and “rushed into the Cold War”— perhaps for the purpose of shoring up his domestic clout in a political environment, created by Beria and Malenkov, where atomic strength equated to political power (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 173).

Zubok and Pleshakov describe Khrushchev as easy to underestimate. Beria and Malenkov did not see the new leader as a threat to their power because they did not understand that Khrushchev was a son of Stalin and the revolutionary paradigm that he came to represent. The authors inspiringly make this analogy of Khrushchev, quoting a Russian psychiatrist: “...Khrushchev had been a latter Oedipus who had lived in the shadow of his father, Stalin, and passionately loved 'mother' Russia. Later, with 'sadistic satisfaction,' he had committed parricide at the Twentieth Party Congress” (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 179). The whole legacy of the rule of Khrushchev, it seems, was to bring the revolution forward and put Stalin into perspective as a flawed, yet important, part of the march of Bolshevik revolutionary causes.

There is no doubt that Zubok and Pleshakov's short book adds a great deal to the historiography of the Cold War. Their analysis of the early Cold War leaders in the Kremlin is illuminating on two levels. First, the information given is from people who actually grew up in the Soviet Union and watched its collapse. This aspect allows for a lens of scholarship which has a cultural perspective, which is perhaps unavailable to a Western-born scholar. One can't help but think of Cold War era scholars such as George Kennan who had an in-depth knowledge of the Soviet System but could not have possibly understood, from the inside, the Marxist-imperial in the way that a native born scholar could. Second, the popularity of dealing with the Cold War in terms of ideology is given a twist as the two Russian scholars argue that ideological concerns, not specifically Communism, drove the train when it came to Soviet foreign policy. Also, it is interesting to note that Zubok and Pleshakov seem to take it for granted that the United States had its own political ideological concerns which the Soviets (Stalin's legacy) were dealing with through a jaundiced eye, not visible to the West.

The weakness of the book is that there is simply not enough. One would like to see the authors re-write the book and go back farther, perhaps going back as far as the last Czars of Imperial Russia. An historical analysis of just how the Czars were similar to the Soviets would add a good deal of depth to their thesis that the Soviets were working out of the paradigm that they posit as central to the entire life of the Communist empire. Additionally, it would be highly illuminating to add Lenin as the first leader, and grandfather of the Cold War; for certainly it was Lenin's ideological focus that gave Stalin the governmental structure that allowed him to rise to power in the Soviet Union. Also, perhaps a treatment of Lenin's policies would add to making the author's argument (that Stalin neatly fits the “Marxist-Imperialist” paradigm) compelling. As it is written, it would be just as easy to argue that Stalin worked out of his own desire for personal power, no matter how couched his words were in Communist rhetoric.

Unnumbered and the closing chapter of the book, the section entitled “Postmortem: Empire Without Heroes is the most compelling section of the work. The authors give their final conclusions and note that when the last of the leaders mentioned in their book died, the Cold War ended and the Soviet experiment collapsed. Zubok and Pleshakov suggest, “after decades of rivalry, the new elites of the Soviet Union conceded to themselves that the USSR had lost the political and economic competition with the United States” (Zubok and Pleshakov, p. 276). The chapter reads like etchings on a tombstone and give a solemn analysis of the way things went and where they may go in the future, only offering that whatever may happen in Russia, the ideology and the leaders of the Kremlin's Cold War will not return, which is perhaps wishful thinking on their part.

2008-03-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made . Harvard University Press: Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996. 346 pp.

Many people have said that The United States of America is not, in fact, a democracy. Instead, based arguably on the fact that in the United States corporate and Wall Street “men” have tended to make all of the government policy decisions that really matter, they view the United States as a corporation, ruled by its owners. There is no doubt that such critics will find good evidence to support their claim in this book.

As a welcome addition to the historiography of the Cold War, The Wise Men deals with such “owners”: Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, John McCloy Jr., Charles Bohlen, and Robert Lovett, men who greatly influenced the policies of the United States government in an historical transition period. All of these men, of largely different personalities and opinions about their “times,” jointly came to be known as “The Establishment”-- a term which attributes to them the personification of the United States government and its policies before, after, and during the fifty years of the Cold War.

The book's authors are prestigious career reporters and, but some might say that they are also representatives of the elite class that they have written about. Walter Isaacson, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford University and is the managing editor of Time Magazine. Evan Thomas, also a journalist affiliated with Time, is the grandson of Norman Thomas, who was an American Socialist politician and Isolationist who co-founded the America First Committee (AFC), and was strongly opposed to Soviet Communism. It is likely due to this connection, as members of the of the “Harvard leadership establishment,” that their narrative reads as one of admiration for a “club” of men, the elite of the United States, who decided (at least for a few decades) how U.S. Americans would think about the Cold War. This “club,” comprised of white men only, displayed a stalk of privilege running through the lineage of all its members-- something that that the authors discuss frankly and even seem to romantically relish.1

For instance, they mention that Harriman believed that there was nothing mystical about “history,” that it was simply the decisions of “great men”: “At the juncture of historic forces are people in rooms making decisions” (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 286). Additionally, Isaacson and Thomas point out, “It was characteristic of the old foreign policy Establishment that its members could come and go between government and their bank or law firms” (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 428). For the authors, this is something that is nostalgic and noble; noble despite the inherent difficulties a modern reader might have with thinking of Ivy League educated, Wall Street businessmen as suitable moral guides. Nevertheless, Isaacson and Thomas point out that in the days of the Establishment no one worried about such things as “conflict of interest” when it came to working in the government. A true statement without a doubt, because the period covered in the book, at least in the early chapters, is a period of cronyism, racism, and flat out social elitism-- it certainly takes two of their own progeny, Isaacson and Thomas, to paint such a laudable picture of the false nobility which hides the graft and wide sweeping social disparities of the times.

The irresponsible actions of Senator McCarthy and his mob are explained in detail as it relates to the Establishment leaders. Largely because of the anti-Communist hysteria and their work with Roosevelt during the war years, the Establishment fell out of favor during this period. What is striking about the way that Isaacson and Thomas present this part of the story is how blatantly partisan they are in an underhanded way. The authors' position here is that the policies that the “non-partisan” Establishment created were rigidly militarized under Eisenhower and Dulles. Additionally, Isaacson and Thomas, in another chapter, point out that Johnson said: “Look, George, it's not those punks in the street that worry me, it's the right wing. That's the real beast if it ever gets unleashed” (Isaacson and Thomasm, p. 643). This quote, while interesting, ignores the fact that Johnson (along with perhaps the rest of the established power in Washington DC) did consider the New Left movement to be dangerous, and in context it simply shores up the authors' apparent biases concerning the Right.2

Even though the text does have its biases, The Wise Men should cannot be underestimated as a book immense historiographical impact. Right or wrong, the men of The Establishment wielded an uncanny influence on U.S. foreign policy during the period covered and the author of the philosophical underpinnings of this influence was George Kennan. Kennan, for the most part, was not of the same personality and disposition as the rest of the “Wise Men.” He was not a Wall Street banker or a lawyer, but instead a tortured academic, looking for a “niche” in a world of “great men.” His niche turned out to be the policy of Containment laid out in his Long Telegram (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 353).

In The Long Telegram, not only did Kennan define the policy of Containment but he also thoroughly explained what has become a widely popular view of the real influence driving the Soviet foreign policy beneath the veneer of Communism: “At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and “Marxism was mainly a 'fig leaf' for Russia's current rulers, one that served to justify police-state tactics, a closed society, and expansionist ambitions” (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 353).

This interpretation of Kennan's, and assumed by Isaacson and Thomas, is still in debate. For instance, in John Lewis Gaddis' We Now Know, more emphasis is placed on Communist ideology (before the Cuban Missile Crisis) than Kennan would have been comfortable with, at least according to the previous quote from Isaacson and Thomas. Furthermore, many of the “Wise Men” were not convinced of Kennan's view until well into the coldest years of the Cold War. Interestingly though, even though it is Kennan's Long Telegram that Isaacson and Thomas blame for the Red Scare activities of the Truman administration, they note that Kennan never intended his recommended stance against the Communists to create such a frenzied and militarized response in the United States but held out the possibility that Kennan might have been a kind of insecure academic who would constantly hedge his views no matter which way they were interpreted for policy.

Nevertheless, Kennan did not hedge his view when it came to the creation of a Jewish state, nor did any of Truman's other foreign policy advisors. This is discussed by Isaacson and Thomas in a chapter entitled “Crisis.” Given the contemporary debate relating to the war in Iraq the words on page four hundred and fifty two of the text are extremely interesting. Isaacson and Thomas quote James V. Forrestal as saying, “You just don't understand. There are four hundred thousand Jews and forty million Arabs. Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that's all there is to it. Oil-- that is the side we ought to be on” (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 452). In this light, it seems fairly clear that there is a U.S. foreign policy precedent for interest in other nations' oil. But oil aside, President Truman did recognize Israel, despite the lobbying efforts of his Wall Street advisors and their unique sense of “bipartisanism”: a centrist love for money.

Despite the fact that the Wise Men largely disagreed with Truman on the Israel issues, the “club” did side with him on the use of force in Korea without Congressional approval, something that Isaacson and Thomas point out set a bad precedence for future administrations-- the culprit: Dean Acheson. This bad precedent manifested itself, of course, in the actions of LBJ, who had “...subscribed to all the maxims that Acheson had made 'clearer than the truth' and John Foster Dulles had hardened into dogma” (Isaacson and Thomas, p. 642). Isaacson and Thomas further note that LBJ remembered the “loss of China” and apparently did not want to make the same mistake in Vietnam. Nevertheless, whatever blame can be tossed at LBJ, the real foreign policy makers were back on center stage and influencing the President when it came to action in Vietnam. It truly was, at the time, action based on Dulles' interpretation of Kennan's Containment policy. Sadly, the precedent of unilateral Presidential military action continues today, thanks to the corporate elites who were called “Wise Men.”

Isaacson and Thomas have written an important book which adds significantly to the historiography of the Cold War. Despite the fact that the authors attempt to paint a vividly optimistic and nostalgic picture of the six “great men” they write about, it will be self-evident to most readers the inherent contradictions of such a viewpoint. When Isaacson and Thomas cite that most of the Establishment is bi-partisan, one gets the impression that this is only true because their allegiance is to strong drink, power, and wealth. When Isaacson and Thomas go on preening about the little personality quirks of their heroes it is easy to imagine them as imperious, snobbish elitists with only the interest of their ilk in mind as they make decisions that effect the whole world. This is not to say that the men that Isaacson and Thomas write about were not interesting or incredibly important, they were-- but one might suggest that the “iconization” of a rude age of elites does not reveal the entire story.

That real story is not told in The Wise Men because the Wise men were seemingly uninterested in what their foreign policies did to the common person both in the Soviet Union and in the United States. Perhaps the only true hero in the book is George Kennan, who from the very beginning understood the futility of meeting Soviet blustering with strong arm tactics and was, early on, very concerned about the militarized response of the United States towards the Soviet Union. It is this gem from the book that perhaps the authors did not intend, namely, that of the valid position of the Revisionist historian revisited: the Cold War was perpetuated, and largely started, by the militaristic and capitalist expansionism promoted by the United States in Europe and in Asia. Indeed, even the two hot wars in Asia, Korea and Vietnam, can be seen as an American corporate advance in the light of having read The Wise Men because of the influence of corporate America on foreign policy.

We Now Know

2008-03-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

John Lewis Gaddis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1997. 425 pg.

Writing a history of events while in the middle of them would be extremely difficult, and yet, previous Cold War scholars have had to do just that. One of the products of such work has been the various historiographical schools, which were developed during the fifty years of the Cold War. These schools, commonly known as Traditionalist, Revisionist, and Post-Revisionist, are now being reexamined because the Cold War has ended, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, making new sources available to scholars. One of the foremost scholars of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, has been significantly influenced by these new sources as is evident in what has become known as his definitive work on new Cold War Studies, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.

In this book, Gaddis sticks with four major themes in his analysis. First, the pinning of the origins of the Cold War upon the Russians and especially Joseph Stalin. The autocratic government that started under the rule of Lenin took on a new and odious flavor under the psychopathic and paranoid Stalin. His stamp on Soviet leadership was so potent that his influence continued long after he died. The second major theme of the book was that the Cold War was far less bi-polar than has originally been believed. Evidence now available to scholars, such as Gaddis, suggest that some of the Eastern Bloc nations did not necessarily “tow the Soviet line” monolithically. Gaddis's third theme is that the turning point in the Cold War was the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his interesting analysis he shows that both national leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, did not desire nuclear conflict and could work for a state of peace. Finally, Gaddis focuses on the idea that there is much more material to research and that future works on the Cold War will, no doubt, bring even more interesting insight into the study of this 50-year period.

Certainly the most important figure of the entire 50-years was Joseph Stalin. Gaddis's introduction makes it abundantly clear the low opinion that he has of Stalin and his significant mark on the world. He makes the argument by use of social psychology, pinning the term dispositional behavior on Stalin while claiming that FDR was the opposite of dispositional -- a situational leader (Gaddis 20). He goes on to state without any subtly that Joseph Stalin started the Cold War after 1945 because ... it was Stalin's disposition to wage cold wars: he had done so in one form or another throughout his life, against members of his own family, against his closest advisors, against revolutionary comrades, against foreign communists, [and] even against returning Red Army war veterans... (Gaddis 22). This is a compelling argument which seems to be substantiated by the new evidence that Gaddis has acquired in doing his important research. Nevertheless, to lay the complete blame at the feet of Stalin because of his obvious dispositional behavior overlooks the intentional antagonism of the United States toward Communist revolution.

But this is not surprising coming from Gaddis. He has taken a primarily traditionalist view of the Cold War in this book and consistently makes the argument that the war was started by the Soviets based on ideology. This despite the fact that in a previous book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947, Gaddis argues a modified post-revisionist view that the origin of the Cold War was a series of miscommunications and misunderstanding of each other's (the United States and the USSR) goals (White 40). Gaddis's change of opinion is inculcated in the title of this book under review: We Now Know; his argument is that new evidence available now, given that the Cold War is over, has validated the traditionalist historiography. Whether or not this be the truth, it seems a bit of a stretch to conclude from all this that the Russians alone are culpable because of their ideology-- what about U.S. American ideology?

Of course the bi-polar nature of the traditional view of the Cold War can be nicely attributed to ideological differences and it has been customarily thought that the United States government (thanks to Kennan and other early policy makers) was engaged in a noble policy of containing a monolithic Communism bent on world domination. Nevertheless, the truth is much more prosaic than the U.S. American fantasies, according to Gaddis and his new evidence. Indeed, it appears that disagreements between the Soviets and Eastern Bloc nations started as early as the Marshall Plan period.

Many Eastern European countries were open to the aid offered through the Marshall Plan and attended the conference in Paris where it was unveiled by the United States with permission of Soviet leader Stalin. In fact, even after Stalin decided against participation in the program, the Czechs and Poles accepted the aid. Nevertheless, shortly after accepting, Czech and Pole leaders were summoned to Moscow and obliged to decline the aid based on Stalin's suspicions that the Americans were using the Marshall Plan to consolidate a Western Alliance hostile to the Soviet Union (Gaddis 42). Again, Gaddis seems to imply that it was Stalin's ideology which perpetuated the Cold War without giving the same weight to the fact that the Marshall Plan was an intentional move on the part of the of the U.S. Government “to gain control over Western Europe just as the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe” (Wikipedia “Marshall Plan Historiography”). Nevertheless, the end result of Stalin's insistence that Poland and Czechoslovakia abandon Marshall Plan negotiations was that these Eastern Bloc nations developed more slowly than their Western neighbors.

The largest and most obvious rupture of the idea of a “monolithic” Communism came from Soviet-Sino relations. Originally, according to Gaddis and others (including Gordon H. Chang), the Chinese Communists, and especially Mao Zedong, looked to the Soviets as their mentors for building the perfect Socialist state. Apparently, Mao even held-out Stalin to be “big brother,” while he fancied himself and his nation as “little brother.” Nevertheless, after the death of Stalin the relationship between the Soviets and the Chinese began to sour. In Gordon Chang's book this split between the Soviets and the Chinese is argued to be primarily the work of the CIA and a policy of separating and alienating the two Communist giants from one another (Chang 81). But Gaddis's treatment of this fall-out between the Soviets and the CCP focuses more on ideological differences between Mao Zedong and the emerging detente' championed by the successor to Stalin, Nikitia Khrushchev. While this analysis on the part of Gaddis seems to harken back to his more post-revisionist work done in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947, it still poignantly ignores the ideology of the United States, focusing upon the ideological difference between China and the Soviet Union-- and how the Soviets came to their senses in dealing with the United States to the exclusion of their Communist, radical “little brother.”

Turning now to another radical, Fidel Castro in the Caribbean, the reader of We Now Know is given a thorough and interesting historiographical treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gaddis seems to minimize the real threat of war that other scholars have pointed out. For instance, in the oral history work of James G. Blight it is pointed out that in the tumultuous, almost frenzied and varied reactions of President Kennedy's State Department and Cabinet, advice was being given to invade Cuba immediately after the discovery of the secret Soviet missiles (Postel). On the other hand, Gaddis gives a good deal of credit to Kennedy as a remarkable statesman who managed to avert nuclear disaster, even if there never was a real threat. In fact, one gets the impression that Gaddis thinks highly of President's careful maneuvering to a possible compromise with Soviets. According to Gaddis, the President formulated options that would save the world from a nuclear, or even a conventional war, by using masterful state craft in order to present a strong public profile against the missiles in Cuba while working behind the scenes, even around his own staff, to come to a solution which would resolve to peace.

The end result of the peaceful solution of the Missile Crisis, according to Gaddis, is that the boundary lines of the Cold War were drawn and a tense, “long peace” began (Gaddis 261). This “long peace” was centered in mutual threat; the Russo-American relationship from the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis became one of each side viewing their military power as more important than their respective non-military counterparts in waging the Cold War. Also, the Cold War competition took on a stability and predictability after 1962-- neither side wanting to initiate another direct armed confrontation. Additionally, on the other side of the world, Sino-Soviet relations already strained, were destroyed with the Crisis, marking an end to their formal alliance in 1962 as Mao Zedong criticized Khrushchev for “backing down.”

Gaddis, “backing down” from the position of ultimate Cold War historian, makes as a major theme of this book the idea that continued research is needed in the area of Cold War Studies. The deliberate choice of the title, We Now Know, explains the history of the Cold War in a new way which was unavailable to students of history in former generations. Gaddis, meticulously explains his choice of designation in the preface to the book. He does this by way of deconstruction of the three words in the title: We, Know, and Now.

“We” is used in the title to designate scholars of the Cold War era. For Lewis is now dealing with information that was not available to him or to any other scholar before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sources from many former Communist Bloc countries are being made available to these scholars and are being translated and incorporated into the historical record of the Cold War. By using the word “now” Gaddis does not mean to imply a timelessness to the knowledge that we have as a consequence of the Cold War being over. Instead, he intends to indicate that at the present moment we have a contingent amount of knowledge and perspective that was unavailable before hand. “Know” to the author is always subject to the information presently available coupled with the presuppositions that different scholars bring to the table. Gaddis leaves open the possibility that in that future scholars of the Cold War era will have even more insight than past or present scholars are privy to today.

In conclusion, “we” are privy today to a flood of new knowledge, as Gaddis has pointed out. His work is a remarkably good text for a “first look” at the history of the Cold War for the student. Nevertheless, this book is best read in the context of multiple studies on the subject given that Gaddis has developed a fundamental Traditionalist historiography. Without further and diverse reading, a student might become, inadvertently, a follower of the ethos of “triumphant capitalism and democracy,” which is so prevalent in U.S American politics on the right. This is not to say that Gaddis has been “rightist” in his treatment of the Cold War, but it is to say that he is more than likely, sincerely convinced that in the fifty years of ideological warfare that was the Cold War, the United States was finally vindicated as morally superior. To say the least, this is a troubling notion and worth further consideration before taking as dogma.

References
Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972. Standford University Press, CA. 1990.

Postel, Danny. “Revisiting the Brink.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 49, issue 8.

White, Timothy J. “Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies.” International Social Science Review, 2000. vol. 75, issue 3/4.

Agnosticism and Atheism, Posted On rantsnraves.org

2008-03-21T10:45:00.001-07:00

For some time now I have vacillated between calling myself an Agnostic and an Atheist in conversation with those persons in my life who are interested in my belief system, but not nearly as “sophisticated” in their thinking about such things as we are within the Freethinking internets community.

What I mean by sophistication is that we like to neatly define our thinking in logical terms often not employed widely, or very useful in our daily lives.

Bertrand Russell explained this idea of “sophistication” on the subject in his famous piece Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?

Quote:
Proof of God
Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
(Russell, 1947)

I think that it is more true to say that I am an Agnostic because I certainly do not think that at this point in time human persons are able to know whether or not there is some kind of higher power akin to an intelligent first cause.

But perhaps this is simply my own “inability of imagination” as was suggested by Daniel Dennett in his import work Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. In that book many of you know that Dennett called the process of Evolution an algorithm that does not require any intelligent input to do what it does, it simply does what it does, and it does it every time (Dennett, 1996).

While I agree with Dennett that a good analogy of what takes place in Evolution Theory can be viewed as philosophically analogous to an algorithm, my question to him and to any other person willing to think about such things is “by what means was the algorithm established?”

I ask “by what means was it established” because I recognize that not all algorithms were created by programmers; some, such as mathematical algorithms like long division were discovered and would work perfectly even if no human being on earth knew the formula. Thus so, life, I think, would originate under the constraints of its own formulae, whether or not human beings had the capacity to think about it—“it does what it does, and does it every time.”

Nevertheless, this still leaves me with the question of “by what means?” or more simply, “how?” This is the ultimate question for and I believe that it is precisely why, despite each new, discrete and interesting thing I read out of quantum physics or other interesting science well beyond my capacity, that I return, time and time again to the position of Agnosticism among those who care to understand my belief system more thoroughly, or “sophisticated” people on the internets.

What is an Agnostic?
http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/humftp/E-tex...l/agnostic.htm

On the other hand, I am an Atheist given that there is no belief system incorporated on the earth that I would not disbelieve prima facie without extraordinary evidence contrary to my disposition towards disbelief of such things. Therefore, I am with Russell here in describing myself to most people on the street as an Atheist.

I am still skeptical about Atheism as an appropriate response to the question “How?” We know that everything exists; we know that everything is evolving, going extinct, in motion, changing, expanding, etc. But do we really know “how” it all began? For me this is a major weakness for the “strong” Atheist who holds that there is evidence for a natural origin of the universe and against the existence of any gods, no matter how abstract the concept.

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins <-- I have not read Dawkin's latest book, sorry

The Impossibility of God, Martin and Monnier <--anthogology of phil argument contra god, interesting to say the least

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett

Darwin's Black Box, Behe <--- can 'o wormz right thar

Also, various essays on "Skepticism" from Bertran Russell, which are all basically superior to the previously mentioned books imo.

A Short History of Apostasy

2008-03-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

What follows is what will one day become a long essay on my deconversion. Right now I consider this to be notes that deserve a good bit more attention. I post them here for posterity, and to remind myself that this is still outstanding.

While riding in the backseat of a car a young male child says, “I’m thirsty.” It was me and I really was desperately thirsty. The kind of thirst that grips you until you can think of nothing else, like after eating an incredibly salty picnic ham. I was so young that my mind still didn’t do very well with abstract concepts such as the answer that my mother’s sister gave me, “Would you like some living water? Its water that is so potent that when you drink it you never thirst again!” I was, of course, delighted to have some of this living water. That is the end of my memory, I don’t recall if I ever got the concept or not.

A First Glimpse
The year that I read The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand was a banner year. I was stationed at K-2 Air Base, Taegu, Republic of South Korea. I started the book in the summer a few months before I would be leaving the country and going back to a state side assignment in the Air Force.

Memories of how that book influenced my thinking are mixed with memories of painting the Squadron area, mowing the lawn and performing honor guard duty down at the port city of Pusan, South Korea. Out of these mixed memories one important concept comes to the forefront every time I think of Ayn Rand's philosophical book. A memory of talk about a heroic man-- a human being who finds his own self worth in what he or she is able to create with his own hands; an independent and totally responsible and finite man. I have since studied Objectivism a bit more and am not totally convinced, but in those days, the categories and the new way that reality was laid out for me was exciting; for the first time in my life I can remember being truly inspired by the fact that I was a human being. I was a human, a creature with the potential to master the earth, to be creative and to produce with my own hands.

On the other hand, religion had taught me that I mattered and was loved, but that my creativity, intellect, etc. came to me by the grace of God and that everything that was inherently me was evil and I believed that I was essentially bad. After all, I had been told that I was evil by word and through deeds done to me since I was in diapers. Not all of the messages were cruel, but the foundation of that message I heard and experienced, from both those people who abused me and those people who loved me, was that human beings were inherently and essentially bad-- or full of “sin,” to use the religious term. So the idea that human beings are essentially good had a profound effect on my psyche, especially at a time in my life when I was looking for a way to sow wild oats and not feel so guilty about it.

Nothing Noble about It
Yes, the truth is that my time in Korea was spent in bars, drinking and hanging out with prostitutes. I felt guilty about it, but not enough to quit doing it while I was in Korea, despite that fact that I had boarded the airplane in 1989 after having just received my preaching certificate from my home church in Victoria, Texas. That church sent me there to be a representative of the Gospel, but the attraction of sin and guilt was far too strong to for my young sensibilities to overcome.

On the subject of guilt, I have been told my entire life that guilt is a normal, natural emotion that is used by the Holy Spirit to persuade us to do right. I think that it is true that our sense of guilt or conscience does persuade us to do right when it is functioning correctly. Some of this guilt is likely a product of biology while some of it is learned feeling based on what we have been taught is right and what is wrong. We’re told, for instance, that sex before marriage is wrong… how else could we feel the slightest pang of guilt about such a basic and utterly human endeavor when we engage in sex in or out of marriage? It’s because we have been given guidelines about this particular behavior that we feel good or bad about it. But in regards to other behaviors that are less natural, murder for instance, most people don’t require explicit rules; instead, there is a kind of natural aversion for murder, even when in a time of war.

Not that there is anything at all wrong with having rules about behavior, I rely on quite a few in order to be able to live my life in peace and prosperity. It’s the preponderance of rules laid out by the Church that had me, at the time, in an almost perpetual state of guilt. The problem was that I wanted to drink, smoke and hang out with girls that do! I don’t have the slightest idea why I wanted to, but I did, and that desire created a tremendous internal conflict for me as a young, religious man.

The consequences of my internal conflict were what I call the roller coaster effect. I was sometimes at the top of the roller coaster “serving God” and sometimes at the bottom of the drop-off “serving mammon.” So my pursuit of vice while in Korea was not a new problem for me, just a continuation of the basic pattern of my life to that point. All through junior high and high school I had done the same thing. Metaphorically, about every 6-8 months I would either up-shift to God or down-shift towards the Devil. The “things of the world” were delicious to me but also were the “things of god”-- the two simply could not be reconciled under the constraints of my semi-fundamentalist Baptist religion. It was a wild ride, but I love roller coasters.

Back Home
I returned home from Korea later that year and, of course, visited my parents who are devout Baptists and had sent me to Korea with my preaching certificate. What a surprise it must have been for them to hear I had now rejected the Christian faith-- but only for a time, and they knew it. It was a first rejection; the rejection of the prodigal son, wanting riotous living and having only a small piece of a reality beyond sin, guilt, and religion—that piece, my parents quickly identified to me as “Humanism” after I explained to them my newfound enlightenment about what it meant to be a human person. But at 19 I had really never considered what the term “Humanism” meant. So I began to study a little bit about the subject and came to the conclusion that it wasn't all that bad to be somewhat humanistic. I even began to incorporate some humanistic philosophy into my life as I slowly drifted back into the arms of the Church on account of the gentle persuasion of my conscience or my parents, or both.

If it was my conscience that brought me back, it was because the moral teachings of the fundamentalist Church have always been a strong theme in my life. If fact, one the most important principles that I learned from my parents was that obedience was better than sacrifice-- this is in the Old Testament somewhere. They had learned this and understood it as a first principle along the way, and over the years of attending our fundamentalist First Baptist Church, had passed the knowledge to me. I was never sure what sacrifice was, but I knew precisely what obedience was. Obedience boiled down to the Fundamentalist cliché': “Don't smoke, drink or chew, or go with girls who do,” also, don't do drugs or dance.

In reality, because my moral base was so inextricably connected to the moral teachings of the fundamentalist Church, I had no choice but to return to the arms of the Church when I wanted to assuage my conscience. And to a certain extent I still grapple with the issues related to morality as a non-Theist. So certainly at age 19 I was in no position to sit down and write down my own system of morality as Benjamin Franklin was able to do at a young age, I simply did not have the capacity for such things at the time. Looking back now on this re-conversion I surmise that I didn't have the scope to find real answers for myself given the emotional pain I was working through, thanks to my not-so-good early childhood experiences. And yet, this primal de-conversion opened the door to my mind and my conscience for the first time.

The folks that I call my parents in this essay are actually my Aunt and Uncle who raised me from the time I was 11 until I enter the Air Force at age 18. I found myself living with them because my biological Mother and her boyfriend had gotten themselves into trouble in the early 80s by their involvement in the drug culture. My life before going to live with my Aunt and Uncle was not good. It wasn't the worst abusive situation that I have heard of, but it was painful enough to shape most of the rest of my life and certainly make me a defensive and needy adult. To make a long story short, for the purpose of staying on topic, I will say that the move from my Mother's care into the care of my Aunt and Uncle changed my life story significantly. From age 11 to the present, my life has been inextricably wed to the Church and her mythology because of this move.

Once I moved in with my new family, I went to Church at least three times a week. All of my new friends were deeply involved in the youth group at Church and every social activity was centered on the Church. They were happy days living with my aunt and uncle and the Church became the center of my universe: my friends, emotional support, entertainment, moral instruction, salvation; all there in the Church, neatly packaged and dispensed to me three or four times a week.

And that was a good thing because when I first went to live permanently with my Aunt and Uncle I was an emotional wreck. The years of crazy living and abuse (all for another story) had taken their toil on my young psychic self. I was gaining weight, having trouble with school and generally socially inept. In other words, I was especially receptive to anything that promised hope, salvation, health, friendship and prosperity-- the religion of my aunt and uncle became my medication. It wasn't a pain killer, although it did that most of the time; instead, it was a long term anti-biotic that did a lot of good for many years. I can't say with any confidence that I would have been able to get as far in life as I have without the presence of the Church.

Still at Home
So there I was, about to turn 20 and back in the loving arms of my one refuge: The Church. I was becoming a humanistic thinking Christian and although I wasn’t very committed or devout, at that time I was thinking that I would be entering professional clergy one day. It is puzzling to me that I always assumed I would go into the Christian clergy as a profession. Looking back on it, I realize how thoroughly my own goals had been paralyzed by the influence of my adopted parents. This coupled with the fact that I was desperately (at least subconsciously) trying to self-medicate the pain of my early childhood. I think that in my subconscious I believed that my parent's expectation for me was that I become a Christian minister, although I realize now that their power and perceived expectation of my future was not as important to them as I thought. All they really wanted from me is to be a good convert and a respectable adult no matter what profession I chose. Nevertheless, I always knew I would enter the ministry; after all, the most devoted of Christian were the ministers.

I was standing in the kitchen at my uncle’s house in the fall of 1993 talking about my failed relationships. My uncle told me at the time that when I went to New Orleans to go to seminary in the spring that I would meet someone. I did meet her at Orientation that January 1994. She was wearing a longer skirt, but still her slim body and her legs caught my eye. I was wearing a suit with suspenders, which was my style for a time as a Churchman. I was behind her one spot and to the left, she turned around and offered me some gum, either out of interest in me or common courtesy I am still unsure. At any rate I turned down the gum, but I was interested. It was one more “chance” meeting in the coffee shop of the student center and we were dating. The rest is the history of our family…

With regard to my marriage I have found that the reality of my relationship is far superior to the fantasy that I had created in my mind regarding whom I would eventually marry. But being in a committed, loving relationship has been difficult for me and my journey away from the Church has exasperated and changed the rules. Frankly, I believe that it was much easier for me to be a husband while I was a Baptist Preacher-Chaplain. I mean, I was by title the model of a good husband. And even if I failed to live up to the standards of being a good husband and father there was always that title, and the hope that the Faith would continue to make me a better person, a better husband and father. In retrospect, that was a fantasy on my part and, I believe, in the mind and heart of my wife who tends to romanticize the past by hoping against hope that I will return to the faith.

A Clergyman
So becoming a part of the professional clergy was one of my childhood assumptions that did happen because I had total control of it. The Seminary degree, the title, and even the big salary came, but the things that my aching psyche were searching for never did come, despite the good things I was sure that all professional ministers received: emotional health, respect, and happiness. My choice of a profession was a by-product of years of trying cope with my own personal pain coupled with the strong implicit influence of my devout parents. Religion and the professional clergy was, for me, a sophisticated system of self-medication. Nevertheless, I understand this now in retrospect and at the time I sincerely believed I was “called” and that overshadowed misgivings about my suitability-- mine or anyone else's.

think this is why, as I matured in both age and in the ministry that it began to strike me as odd the number of people in the profession who do a truly bad job at it. It also made me more sympathetic towards those “bad” ministers whom I don’t believe for a minute are specifically malicious in their intent when they stay in the professional clergy, I just think that they are unaware of their incompatibility and totally committed to the doctrine of “calling.” That was certainly my experience as a “bad” minister. I just had a strong sense of “calling” from an early age and it never occurred to me that I might not have the proper personality to be a minister. Well at least it would not be easy for me to be a proper clergyman given my personality, both the healthy parts and especially the unhealthy parts.

In the Desert
It took a while but I eventually live-out my childhood assumption of becoming and minister. I went to Seminary, started churches, and then joined the military chaplaincy in both the Air Force and the Army. I followed that path for 10 years until one day in the desert I finally got it: I could never be a minister and should make myself a path to stop when I go back home.

I wrote a poem on that day:
I fell with a thud, thud, upon the cement of my own personal existence here in this dusty land of savage and stupid men. This ground broke my body once more and there is no doctor save myself. But my own instruments are rusty crosses and medicinal confessions which lost their power to heal me while I was busy sleeping with my head between mammary books, still stacked beside me tall-- and dusty covered with the dust of Genesis and the Stoics. The Ghost of my vocation still haunts me though. And everyday the familiar routine of that work distracts me from the reality that I have traded my religion for my life, just as the persecuted Christians did under the brutal Emperors of Rome. That Emperor came to me as well and offered pleasures or alienation and death to my existence in this time and place. A better man would have traded his existence for something so beautiful and true. But I am not a better man, I am the Lapsi; and my unconfession is true.

But losing my profession was only a by-product of the real thing that was happening to me in the desert. I was losing my religion altogether and it’s easy now for me to recall that day out there in the desert when it finally occurred to me that I no longer believed. A place and time like no other that I had previously experienced: It was an Existential revolution of the mind, emotion, and some would say the spirit!

I was nine years old when my Aunt and Uncle took me and my mother the First Baptist Church Houston Texas revival services at Rice Stadium. This was the dawn of contemporary Christian music and on stage that night would be the Imperials singing Sail On and Ole' Buddha. After the Preacher gave his message I felt deeply convicted of my sin and wanted to make Jesus the Lord of my life more than anything else in the world. I was deeply and emotionally converted as I walked forwarded singing, “Just as I am without one plea, but that his blood was shed for me.” I was crying as the preacher said words over us from the platform and then prayed. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior that night, without a doubt. My bio-mom had come with but she was not so moved. She asked, “Why are you crying”? Maybe she didn't get it...? I did.

Can losing your religion be a spiritual experience? I know that my existence at the time was harsh, and yet, I felt the passing of each day more vividly than I had ever felt before. Existentialism was on my mind because I was studying the philosophy of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others; what was on my conscience was the people of Iraq and the war. The whole experience was real and “in your face” and there was no way to reject the verdict that the experience of Iraq demanded in me. What was that verdict? Religion is not true. It was a complete existential revolution, a contradiction of the meaning I had made a foundation for my life in ‘78.

This existential revolution came in pieces and parts. One day while traveling down a highway in Iraq I came to the conclusion that there obviously was no grand design to life. Sometimes I would travel down a road and be safe, the next day someone else would travel down the same road and would be killed. It was all random and made a plain case against any form of Providence that any person could readily appreciate. On another day, it occurred to me that my own personal devotion to the Christian religion was hard not to compare to the devotion felt by my enemy towards Islam. We were the same then, them and me. We were both so convinced of the other's error and our correctness-- we were both wrong.

A curious thing started to happen, as the religious foundations of my life were beginning to crumble, I began to sense that I was becoming more at peace with myself for some reason. At first I did not realize why I felt this way, but as I began to question and then put aside many of the doctrines that I once held dear it became more obvious.

For the first time in my life I gave myself my Reason to use free of the restraints imposed on it by the Christian Church. The answers became a lot less simple but the search started to become my passion and my real medicine. Where Christianity had been a blinding patch, Skepticism became a liberating and true seeing. I am a better man without Christianity, and I am glad to leave it behind.

I’m 14, in the main sanctuary of our Church, my refuge, familiar to me in every way. The kind older gentleman leader the congregation in song is Gary, the music minister for more than 20 years. How many songs did I sing under his direction? Only god knows. I sing during the invitation, I feel that conviction both in my “heart” and my hands once more! I must do something. I love music and feel this overwhelming calling from an unseen motivation. I believe that I am “called”! I feel so special! So grateful to be one of the few chosen for a life of ministry and service to God! I walk forward, joyous and surrounded by the approbation of all the adults in the congregation.

The Aftermath
The first several weeks after my return from the Iraqi wilderness were tenebrous for me-- would I start to believe again or would the overwhelming doubt and forlornness continue?

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of life- preservers. ~Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 48: The First Lowering

I would not start to believe again, but it seems as though others then had the opportunity, for a short while, to be my salvation, to turn me back towards the safety of the religion that I held so dear. These would-be and possible saviors were the other Chaplains in council around me, men who had served God and Country for years longer than I. They tried, with sometimes kind and sometimes cruel words and actions to steer me back onto the right path, but that metaphorical haze and the open ocean was too much for me, I had already been lost in the wilderness of my own doubts about Christianity coupled with the heartache I felt concerning the cruel things I was experiencing, either carried home from Iraq or wrecked upon me on the shores of Fort Sill, OK.

These cruel things wrecked upon me were of my own making. They were the petty things that a wounded soldier says and does upon returning to garrison; things not even worth mentioning in this essay that turned my would-be saviors against me over time. Not only that, but also I could no longer function as a minister in Sunday services without experiencing a nausea of dissonance between my apostasy the requirements of my office. This caused me to commit a mortal sin: I refused to preach.

Refusing to preach in Sunday services because of a crisis of conscience brought my apostasy to the forefront in the minds of my supervisors. No longer was it an internal struggle that they could help me with, instead I become an outward symbol of what they had been struggling again their whole lives: unbelief.

“Unbelief,” that thing that made Chaplain irrelevant to commanders in the Army; that thing that caused commanders to wonder out loud what the Chaplain was doing the staff meeting or the battle planning session; that thing that caused commanders to measure up chaplains with mocking eyes; the very thing that caused Ivy league legal students to sue the Armed forces in order to undo the Chaplaincy—“Unbelief”, their mortal enemy. Now I was the standard bearer of their enmity; I was their Judas, I had kissed them on the check with my refusal to preach.

So, cutting the lashing of the water-proof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. ~Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 48: The First Lowering

Miserable and forsaken I continued to do my job in the battalion I was assigned upon my return. In terms of spiritual advice, I had none. But what I did have to offer was a keen ability to counsel people through their difficulties. This was something that I had been working on for years, having taken training classes, read numerous books, etc. I had become quite proficient with both individual and family counseling. So although I had something to offer my unit, I didn’t have exactly the right thing that a Chaplain should have. It was during these days that I began to identify myself most closely with the figure of Queequeg holding up that lantern in the midst of his own despair, “… the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” For the first time I was required to feel the same sense of confusion, loss, and utter despair that those whom I was counseling felt. I couldn’t remind them gently about the God who knows and understands their sufferings and could do something about it if he willed, there was no medicine of this kind anymore.

Little did I know at the time how much this struggle was changing me; I found myself becoming more empathetic and less critical of others. Family members and friends whom I had been critical and judgmental of started to strangely find a place in my good graces for real, and not just out of practical necessity. I was becoming a better person sans the guidance of Religion-- this was a strange revelation.

But becoming a better man was not without its trials or its setbacks. Imagine yourself, Seminary trained, married into a family as ensconced in the Christian religion as your own, putting oneself on the margins of the family conversations-- either that or making every chit-chat into an argument about religion. Imagine the pain that you cause your beautiful, patient wife through now, several years of committed apostasy after 10 years of shared Faith. My trials started in the desert that day, in the middle of a no-man’s land but my wife’s trials began when I returned to Fort Sill, OK in the March of 2004

10Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. 11The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. 12She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. ~Proverbs 31: 10-12

As for setbacks, being without a clear moral foundation after so long a time relying on the one given you by your Church can be unnerving.

A Comparison of an Existential Theory to Psychosocial Theory

2008-03-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Comparing Existentialist Theory to the, comparatively speaking, “hard science” of human development theory developed by Erik Erickson can be challenging. On one hand, Erickson's stages of development are seemingly uniform and predict specific behavior and psychosocial tasks along a predictable time line (Newman and Newman, 2006). On the other hand, the Existentialist gives us what on the surface looks to be a highly philosophical theory of personality which emphasizes utter freedom, anxiety, and a seemingly unpredictable lifespan development based on how each individual experiences the commonalities of aloneness, meaninglessness, and mortality (Yale, 1989). To say that Existentialist Theory is not as straight forward and predictable as Psychosocial Theory is perhaps an understatement. Therefore, it is prudent to lay out in advance some specific areas with which to constrain this particular paper.

In this paper Psychosocial Theory is defined and compared with Existential Theory in general and with the specific “developmental” framework of Roll May, who is considered the best known of American Existential Psychologists (Bore, 2006). While there are many other Existential theorists who are extremely important, May’s work is preferred here because he was the only Existentialist who held that there were certain “stages” of development that could be observed during the lifespan (May, 1953). This similarity between the two is not surprising given that both May and Erickson had in common a Freudian influence (Newman and Newman, 2006; Reeves, 1977).

Next, the Existentialist concepts of Umwelt (the physical), Mitwelt (the social), Eigenwelt (the psychological), and Uberwelt (the transcendent), are examined and compared with the Psychosocial approach to the interaction of the biological, psychological, and societal systems, as presented by Newman and Newman (Newman and Newman, 2006; van Deurzen and Bantam, 2005). Here the expression “systems of being” is used in order to emphasize the Existentialist concept of “being” (Casein) while comparing the several “systems” used by both Erikson and Roll May (Headgear, 1927).

Finally, an examination of how both theories work reciprocally in Social Work practice is presented as a conclusion that while Psychosocial Theory tends to be highly descriptive of human development in a general way, Existential Theory tends to work best on the individual level as each person creates meaning within the context of their own experiences (May, 1953). This principle difference in focus suggests that the two theories are complimentary to one another rather than in every respect, different conceptual frameworks.

Theories Defined

When a definition for the term “Psychosocial Theory” is needed, one only needs to look at the work of Erickson and his students. It is plainly laid out and even has charts-- not so with Existential theory. The latter is an umbrella term which covers a wide variety of theories, only slightly different from one another, within a framework laid out during what many have called a “movement,” more than a school of philosophy (Existentialism, 2007). Nevertheless, Existential Theory does have its commonalities, just not in the uniform way that Psychosocial theory does. The principle reason for this is that Psychosocial theory is connected to the theory of evolution in a broad, yet fundamental way (Newman and Newman, 2006).

It was Julian Huxley, the grandchild of evolutionary protagonist Thomas Henry Huxley, who developed a construct termed “Psychosocial Evolution.” Psychosocial Evolution is the larger theory of human development wherein theorists hold that human persons are able to transmit a range of human knowledge and abilities from their ancestors to their children, and so on; or that Evolutionary Theory led to advances in human organization in many different aspects, not merely biological (Newman and Newman, 2006; Huxley 1953). For this reason, Erickson's psychosocial theory has a major distinctive philosophical assumption which distinguishes it from Existential Theory.

This distinction is summed up in the expression “progress without goal,” a saying used by J. Hugely in order to distinguish his teleology from the Aristotelean view, and is an admitted assumption of Psychosocial Theory (Newman and Newman, 2006; Huxley, 1942). While it is true that most Existentialists would say a human person's development is without meaning independent of the individual experiential, it does not assume that growth will occur by any “evolutionary” factors beyond a person's immediate control or beyond the will and freedom of that individual. It does not assume, for instance, what Newman and Newman, 2006, state as an assumption of their text on Psychosocial Theory: “Growth occurs at every period of life, from conception through very old age” (p. 5). Instead, Existential Theory predicts that every individual has the potential to create his own fulfilling meaning (“grow”) in a world of varied experiences by way of internal exploration and adaptation to his or her own environment (Krill, 1996).

Systems of Being

In order to further define Existential Theory it is important to give attention to what Existentialists might call “systems of being.” These dimensions, or “systems” of being are convenient for this paper because they mirror what Erickson understood as the “arenas” of human development: the biological, psychological, and societal systems (Newman and Newman, 2006). But for the Existentialist, the systems; namely: Physical (Umwelt), Psychological (Eigenwelt), Social (Miwelt) and Transcendent (Uberwelt), are inextricably linked to the concept of “Being” -- as defined by various Existentialist philosophers and Roll May as “[not] a collection of static substances or mechanisms or patterns but rather as emerging and becoming, that is to say, as existing” (Reeves, 1977; May, 1983). For most Existentialists, it is within these “systems of being” that human persons use their utter freedom, in the immediate moment, in suffering or in joy, to create their own meaning in life (Krill, 1996). In other words, to be a human person means to be continually “becoming” and environments are a necessity, without which, there is no person hood, no growth and development – it is simply one's orientation to the world that defines reality (van Deurzen and Bantam, 2005). For Erickson, on the other hand, there is growth, good or bad, within the separate reality of the “arenas,” which are also growing and developing, as a basic assumption of Evolutionary necessity (Newman and Newman, 2006).

Additionally, the “dimensions of being” under Existentialism are meant to philosophically transcend race and culture, and be sufficiently broad enough to encompass any human person (van Deurzen and Bantam, 2005). Whether or not they are that exactly is debatable; but the fact that Psychosocial Theory deals with these “arenas” by giving specific attention to race and culture, highlights how differently these two theories understand what the essence of “systems of being” is (Newman and Newman, 2006). For Psychosocial theory the point is that race, culture, sauce-economic status, matter a great deal when understanding how the societal aspect of human development affect development (Newman and Newman, 2006). In sharp contrast, for Existential Theory, it is not the specific place and circumstances of one's existence that shape a person's development, it is what the person makes of his or her circumstances (May, 1953)

“Stages” of Development

Even though Existential Theory insists that individuals are utterly free to create their own sense of growth, meaning, and development in the world, questions concerning how this freedom is accessed by people at various levels of maturity throughout the lifespan have not been frequently addressed by theorists (Bore, 2006). Nevertheless, psychiatrist Roll May did give some attention to certain Existential stages that further illuminate the differences between Psychosocial Theory and Existentialism while giving the two theories a clear common ground. Erickson saw eight stages of Psychosocial development along the course of the lifespan in contrast to May's four. For EEricksonon the stages were linear based on age while May understood his stages to be far less linear, at least beyond the first stage of Innocence (Newman and Newman, 2006; Reeves, 1975). Innocence, according to May, is that time in human development that is pre-egoic, wherein the infant is “like a wild animal” and has no concept or ability to access the essential quality “being,” which is freedom (Boeree, 2006). This is in contrast to Erickson's view that growth occurs at every stage of development and that human person activily contribute to their development (Newman and Newman, 2006).

The next stage for May is the stage of Rebellion, which includes children and adolescents, and even young adults. In this stage the the human person wants to enjoy the benefits of freedom, but has not yet fully understood its corolary, responsibility (Boeree, 2006). Contrasting this with the several stages outlined and elaborated on within the framework of Psychosocial Theory gives one a good idea of what could be considered a major weakness of Existential Theory: that is pays far too little attention to what many developmental theories consider to be an important, even foundational, period of human development (Newman and Newman, 2006).

May's last two stages, which are not intended to be completely linear in the way that Erickson's are at least, are the Ordinary and the Creative. For May the Ordinary stage is the normal adult ego, an orthodox confromist who hasn't accessed the Creative level, a level that requires a full embrace of the existentialist concepts of freedom, anxiety, and destiny (Boeree, 2006). Here May's lack of categories might be seen as a complimentary strength within the context of a Psychosocial framework, since, no matter what psychosocial stage a an adult might be in, moving from Ordinary to Creative is assumed to be a desirable therapeutic goal.

Implication for Social Work Practice

In Social Work practitioners deal with a very wide variety of clients and a framework, like Psychosocial Theory, is extremely helpful as a way to begin to understand a new client based on commonalities one might expect from group based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is the real strength of Psychosocial Theory as a foundational theory with which to work in as a context for helping. The role of Existential Theory (psychologically and philosophically) is wholly different, yet complimentary. Existential Theory speaks to a person's freedom and responsibility to develop, grow, and become what they want to be. Therefore, it seems that counseling is the natural fit for the for an application of the theory, withing the context of the understanding that is brought to by Psychosocial Theory. This is the right place for Existential Theory because first and foremost Existentialism is a philosophy posits that human person create the meaning and essence of their lives – a unqiue philosophical perspective in counseling that promotes the will to change for the better (Existentialism, 2007; Krill 1996).

Bibliography

Boeree, C. G. (2006). Personality Theories. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from Rollo May Web site: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/may.html

Existentialism. (2007). In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy [Web]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Krill, Donald (1996). Existential Social Work. In Francis J. Turner (Ed.). (1996). Social Work Treatment. New York, New York: The Free Press.

Heidegger, Martin (1927). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Introduction. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (pp. 1-23). Indianapolis Press, 1975. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegge.htm

Huxley, JS (1953). Evolution in Action. London: Chatto & Windus.

Huxley, JS (1942). Evolution: the modern sysnthesis. London: Allen & Unwin.

May, Rollo (1953). Man's Search for Himself. New York, New York: Norton and Company, Inc.

May, Rollo (1983). The Discovery of Being. New York, New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Reeves, Clement (1977). The Psychology of Rollo May. San Francico, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

van Deurzen , Emmy and Digby Tantam (2005). Existential Psychotherapy. Retrieved November 27, 2007, Web site: http://www.existentialpsychotherapy.net

Yalom, Irivin D. (1989). Love's Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Canada: Harper Collins.

The Underdogs (Los De Abajo) by Mariano Azuela

2008-03-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary Peasants

Any examination of the history of oppression faced by the Mexican and Mexican American people is likely to give some attention to the Mexican Revolution and how that long war changed the spirit of the common Mexican from silently tolerant of their “fate,” to revolutionarily interested in seeking better prospect for their future (Brenner, 1993, p.4-5). According to Glade (1996), inequality was what the Mexican Revolution was about and it was the common “peasants,” working class and marginalized people of Mexico, that struggled to free themselves from the tyranny of a dictatorship that served itself and the interests of foreign businessmen at the expense of the majority of the population (Brenner, 1993).

It is within this context of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that Mariano Azuela’s famous book Los De Abajo (The Underdogs) was written—a novel by a man who had served as a doctor in the front lines of the struggle (Brenner, 1929). The book tells the story of twenty five revolutionary fighters under the command of Demetrio Macias, an illiterate Mexican native from Limón who joined the fight because of a local dispute with one of the country’s many local jefe políticos (Brenner, 1993, p. 12). This small band of fighters gains themselves riches and reputation when they participate with Poncho Villa in the famous capture of Zacatecas (Tuck, 2000).

While Azuela’s novel is neutral regarding the question of whether or not Macias’ men are glorious fighters for the Mexican people or bandits, the fictional character that represents the author is a true believer in the prospect of ¡Qué viva la revolución! proclaiming, “The revolution is for the benefit of the poor, the ignorant, those who have been slaves all their lives, the miserable ones who don’t even know that they are miserable because the rich turn the tears, sweat, and blood of the poor into gold” (Azuela, 2006, p. 15, 24-26; Brenner, 1993, p. 43). It is this idealism expressed by the Macias’s curro (“city slicker”), Luis Cervantes, “a middle-class medical student,” that is the revolutionary hope that only the educated understand in the novel (Azuela, 2006, p. 114; Tuck, 2000). For the peasant-fighters of the Revolution depicted in the novel the more accurate statement of sentiment is given by Demetrio Macias, "I love the revolution like a volcano in eruption. I love the volcano because it's a volcano and the revolution because it's a revolution” (Took, 2000).

The People’s Epic Struggle
In whichever way the Mexican and Mexican American people have envisioned their epic struggle over oppression the history of their subjugation is staggering. The oppressive system that brought on the start of the Mexican Revolution was what can be called the culmination of systematic, racist oppression which began with the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1520s (Handbook of Texas Online, 2007; Sweet, 1997). According to Sweet (1997), “early modern Europeans conflated what we now call ‘culture’ with what we now call ‘race.’ Thus, for the early modern period, race and culture cannot be easily separated. A people’s inferior culture implied a biologically inferior people” (p. 144).

This was certainly the view held by the ruling elite of Porfirio Diáz’s regime concerning the indigenous Mexican people (Brenner, 1993, p. 10). Therefore, by the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the great majority of the land in Mexico had been taken by a small minority of men called hacienderos with the consequence that the 3/5 majority native population of Mexico were ninety-seven percent landless and reduced to the status of peón, serf, and in some cases, essentially slaves (Brenner, 1993; Cordova, 1997). It is very little wonder, then, that Azuela describes revolutionary fighters, poor and desperate, as both victorious revolutionaries and looting bandits (Azuela, 2006, p. 48-49).

An enduring glimpse into how Europeans have disparaged the indigenous and mixed race Mexican people is presented in a subtle passage concerning a young Mexican girl of Spanish descent brought to a party and protected by the idealistic Louis Cervantes. In the passage, “a girl of rare beauty,” desired by all the revolutionary peasants in attendance, is blond haired and blue eyed (Azuela, 2006, p. 50). This points to the reality, then and now, of a general and pervasive preference for light skinned people of European descent in Mexico (Gross, 2003, p. 205) The ruling elites were light skinned, their preferred business partners in the world (mostly US Americans) were light skinned, and the approximately one thousand land owners of Mexico were also mostly light skinned (Brenner, 1993). As a matter of fact, during the days of Diáz’s rule in Mexico, Americans of European descent were treated with special extraterritorial consideration which made them exempt from Mexican law (Brenner, 1993, p. 11).

Taking the Struggle to the United States
It was in reaction to this oppressive system that the common Mexican people revolted and, with the help of their now legendary leaders, created the chaos that lead to what one scholar calls the “The Immigrant Era” in the United States (Garcia, 1985, p. 196; Wood, 2001). Between the years 1900 and 1930, intensified by the social chaos endemic to the Mexican Revolution, about one million Mexicans crossed the border into the United States (Garcia, 1985, p. 197). Even the author of The Underdogs joined the joined the throng of masses seeking a better life north of the border (Tuck, 2000).

Mexican immigrants of this period brought with them their cultural identity and formed an extension of Mexico in the southwestern part of the United States (Garcia, 1985, p. 198). The people also brought with them the aspect of the Revolutión noted by Azuela’s idealistic curro (“city slicker” Luis Cervantes) as “…the sublime triumph of Justice; …the realization of …dreams for the redemption of [a] …noble suffering people, …the same men who have watered the land with their blood [should] be the ones who reap the fruits that are legitimately theirs”— and it was their hope to “soon return to la patria once they had saved enough money and once political stability was restored” (Azuela, 2006, p. 37; Garcia, 1985, p. 199).
This spirit of “struggle” for Mexico remained a part of the Mexican psyche despite the fact the Mexican people would continue to face grave issues of discrimination and oppression in the southwestern US, similar to what they had experienced in Mexico before, during and after the Revolutión (Hart, 1998, p. 142-144). Partly because of their tendency to resist Americanization and mostly because of the extreme racism of the United States at the time, Mexicans faced three main issues of struggle in the United States, similar to their plight in Mexico: land (housing), labor (low wage jobs), and a future (education), the hope of the Revolutión, described in The Underdogs as “the triumph of Justice” (Garcia, 1985, p. 202; Azuela, 2006, p. 37).

The Mexican people’s struggle for land, labor, and a future continues to this day, but turn of the century immigrants responded to the oppression of North America by unifying their communities in organizations called mutualistas (mutual aid societies) (McKay, 1993; Rothenberg, DATE, p. 000; AIF; La Raza ). The mutualistas were the communities where the labor and welfare organizations that became the foundation of the Mexican-American civil rights movement were formed (McKay, 1993; Wells, 1995).

Without Regard to Citizenship
It is important to note that there was essentially no distinction made between Mexican-American citizens and Mexican immigrants at the turn of the century and that this tradition of treating all Mexican people with equal disrespect continues, to some degree, to the present generation (Gross, 2003). Azuela sums up the feeling of the privileged class with regard to the masses of peasant revolutionaries in the words of the Federal Soldiers: “Die, you corn grinding thieves!” … “Die, you cattle rustlers!” – all the same, all reprehensible (Azuela, 2006, p. 6). It is equally interesting to note that the Mexican people themselves have tended to not understand themselves as Mexican-American or Mexican immigrant but as part of one La Raza, part of Mexico and part of the United States (Garcia, 1985).

Transcending art though, is the reality of how all Mexican people were treated with a universal disrespect in Texas from the turn of the century , through the civil rights era and to present day as “not the white man’s equal” (de Leon, 1983, p. 103; Gross, 2003; ). In response to the universal discrimination faced under the oppressive system of segregation in the United States, the Mexican people took their struggle to Texas courts in an attempt to “make” themselves “white” and receive the full benefit of that status (Gross, 2003). Gross (2003) examined litigation of this kind and found that Texas courts, up until the end of segregation and Jim Crow Laws, upheld the oppression of the Mexican people, without regard to citizenship, based on the unsubstantiated stereotypes which were part and partial of the racist state (p. 205).

Perhaps it is out of recognition that hopes for change can be futile, that the peasant revolutionaries often looted the prestigious houses of the wealthy and middle class. This can be viewed in the art as both an act of “struggle,” in the physical act of taking what had been denied them, and also as an act of futility, as a “grasping” in the face of the realization that the hope of the Revolutión will be denied them, despite their struggle (Azuela, 2006, p. 50, 87; Took, 2000). To some degree, because of the reality of racist segregation in the United States during this immigrant period, the story of the Mexican people’s struggle north of the border, until at least the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, can be likened to the disillusionment felt by Demetrio Macias’ men, who struggled— perhaps for the sake of struggling— gaining and losing at the same time (Azuela, 2006, p. 114; Took, 2000).

Historic Oppression, Historic Struggle
Systemic American apartheid, called “Segregation,” based on skin color and physical appearance, is the major historical contributor to the Mexican people’s social inequity in the United States with regard to the three main areas of struggle identified earlier in this paper: land, labor, and a future (Sweet, 1997, p. 144-145).

Segregation in housing meant that the huge influx of Mexican worker-families who immigrated to places like El Paso were relegated to the most inexpensive and miserable rental properties in the city. These neighborhoods along the border soon became “dangerous places of disease and pathology,” given that the white elites suspected and neglected the growing communities (Wood, 2001, p. 495-495, 502; Hart, 1998, p. 146). Compounding the problem was the issue that even these neglected neighborhoods contained insufficient housing to accommodate the numbers of Mexican immigrants. For instance, between the years of 1900 and 1930 the Mexican population of El Paso grew from 15,906 to 102,421 (Wood, 2001, p. 494).

Nevertheless, these early tenants, poor Mexican workers, were armed with that spirit of Revolutión described by the idealist Luis Cervantes who says, “we must not forget that for a man the most sacred things in the world family and the motherland” (Azuela, 2006, p. 26). And this was precisely what the early Mexican immigrants were struggling for when in 1922 rental tenants in several US and Mexican cities along the border organized the Sindicato Fronterizo de Gallos (Border Syndicate of Tenants). This group demanded lower rental rates, more recent construction and legal rights concerning evictions, achieving some of their goals (Wood, 2001, p. 499).

American segregation also meant that in labor the lowest paying and often the worst, physically demanding jobs were filled by Mexican workers because of racist stereotypes that informed the oppressive system. Mexican workers were thought to be unintelligent, lazy, and undependable (Hart, 1998, p. 144). Of course, this reinforced the racial division of Labor and contributed to the general condition of poverty experienced by the Mexican people (Hart, 1998, p144-145). Additionally, because of their status and the cyclical nature of the agricultural work, with which most Mexican workers were employed, displacement tended to strain traditional family networks (Hart, 1998, p. 216-217).

Born out of the hardship of racism, segregation, and racially assigned working-class status, the mutualistas became the platform from which the spirit of the Revolución struggled (Hart, 1998, p. 217). As Wells (1995) asserts “[the Mexican people used] …a variety of tactics, including withholding labor, community-based organizations, the formation of Mexican trade unions, and sporadic armed conflict, Mexican workers creatively responded to racism and demeaning working conditions by drawing on their cultural identity to forge a sense of community.”

Segregation in education meant that Mexican children went to the worst schools and received a poor education compared to the educational opportunities afforded to the privileged white class (Sutherland, 1952). Additionally, education in Mexican schools reinforced the stereotype that the Mexican people were a working class race because teachers often emphasized vocational training and assumed that children of migrant workers had no academic ability (Ruiz, 2001). Mexican parents struggled to try to bring some equity to education for their children even in a time when as estimated 1/3 of the Mexican population in the United States was being deported or repatriated back to Mexico (Ruiz, 2001). Deportation further compounded disparities concerning the education of immigrant children just as the modern practice of INS raids and deportation is disrupting the lives of this generation of Mexican immigrant children (Ruiz, 2001; Lozano, 2007).

A Letter from Luis Cervantes
At the conclusion of The Underdogs the idealistic curro, Luis Cervantes, has given up on the Revolutión and moved to the United States. From there he writes a letter to the leader of the peasants who were his compadres during the war, encouraging him to bring his loot to the North for a better life, where they can start a Mexican Restaurant (Azuela, 2006). This is the final resignation of the idealist and perhaps it is understandable given the times. A long defeat of struggle would continue for the Mexican people for another 54 years in the United States and the plight of the common person in Mexico is still uncertain, 97 years later.

Modern Oppression, Modern Struggle
Despite the grim outlook for the “hope of the Revolutión” in segregated North America and in Revolutionary Mexico, the Mexican people have advanced their struggle, achieving victories in housing, education, and labor through the organizing spirit of La Revolutión. Starting in the mutualistas and perhaps culminating in the work of the modern Hispanic political, research and social action groups such as The National Council La Raza, The Industrial Areas Foundation (AIF), and the Pew Hispanic Center, the Mexican people have made tremendous strides since the end of Segregation and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—gains that Luis Cervantes could not dream of, in fact (pewhispanic.org; www.industrialareasfoundation.org; www.nclr.org).

Nevertheless, the same issues of disparity around land, labor, and education remain the central “struggle” with which the Mexican (Hispanic) people struggle. The contemporary debate on “illegal” immigration harkens back to earlier debates on immigration (Sutherland, 1952). The voter’s guide of the National Council of La Raza includes issues regarding safer communities, quality education, and job opportunities (www.nclr.org). And the median income of Hispanics is almost half as much as that of Anglos, suggesting that many Hispanic families have still not won the struggle for land (Rothenberg, 2007).

The Role of the Social Work Profession in the Mexican People’s Struggle

Bornstein (2004) suggests that innovative organizations practice institutional listening, pay attention to exceptional information, design real solutions for real people, and focus on human qualities rather than credentials. As social workers continue to work with their growing Mexican (now often called “Hispanic”) community it will be important to understand what Bornstein is suggesting since promoting the hope of the Mexican people has historically involved community organizing.

One local expression of this organizing is the work of Austin Interfaith (AIF). While AIF is not specifically a Hispanic organization, Hispanic people have filled the ranks of the local organization since its founding in 1985 (Simon and Gold, 2002). The reason for this likely goes back to the mutualism that has been the context of the Mexican people’s struggle throughout this paper. Since the interfaith organizations in Texas and elsewhere tend to recruit people from local churches and schools in low income neighborhoods, the most responsive in Austin have thus far been the Hispanic population, though the organization is becoming increasingly more diverse (Simon and Gold, 2002).

The work of AIF is primarily in education with the flagship for building social capital being the independent non-profit organization Capital IDEA (CI), for which AIF is the parent (www.capitalidea.org; Simon and Gold, 2002, Appendix C). The mission of Capital IDEA is to help low income adults get a college education and enter the workforce—even if that adult starts without a diploma or even an ability to speak English. In the case of CI, the four practices outlined by Bornstein (2004) regarding innovative organization are institutionalized and lived out with both staff and adult learners.

If social workers choose to reproduce the work of organizations like AIF and CI, they will need to also institutionalize and live out Bornstein’s (2004) observation about innovative social organizations. New organizations around future issues will require savvy people who are able to organize and social workers who can create community groups that give the people a platform from which to continue their struggle. Azuela’s novel gives social workers an example of the power of organizing and struggling for a greater cause— modern sophistication may bring the people victory.

Another group of organizers, this one intentionally Hispanic, is the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). The NCLR is a Latino civil rights organization with local affiliates in every state in the Union (www.nclr.org). The Austin affiliate of NCLR is American Youth Works, an organization dedicated to working with high school dropouts (www.americanyouthworks.org). This particular organization was founded by what Bornstein (2004) calls a social entrepreneur (http://www.americanyouthworks.org/founders_story.htm).

Social workers should consider how cultivating the qualities of a successful social entrepreneur can give them a platform from which to ameliorate some of the social justice issues that the Mexican people struggle against. The qualities of “willingness” described by Bornstein (2004) have been a part of the Mexican people’s historic struggle. Helping professionals can learn something from Azuela’s revolutionaries in this regard as well—the peasants shared their victories, broke free of established structures, corrected each other, and fought for a cause larger than themselves, and in their own way, count as social entrepreneurs (Bornstein, 2004, p. 233-241; Azuela, 2006).

Bornstein’s book, How to Change the World, is a collection of stories about the work of people and organizations that he calls Social Entrepreneurs (2004). In the same way that Bornstein adds value to the struggle for the amelioration of the plight of oppressed people, the Pew Hispanic Center chronicles the lives of “Latinos in changing America” (http://pewhispanic.org/). The mission of this organization is to provide peer reviewed credible research findings on a wide range of issues of concern to Latino people. This work gives the people “facts” with which to arm themselves in the struggle.

Social workers should equally be concerned with arming themselves with the “facts” for the purpose of ameliorating the conditions of oppression, which led to the Mexican Revolution in the first place. Working for “Justice,” the hope of the Revolutión, requires understanding, and understanding requires educating oneself. This must be the concern of every person in the social work profession if its professionals are going to have any chance of changing the world and bringing the hope of the Mexican Revolution to fruition in the world.

Luis Cervantes lost his hope for the future of his homeland in the end of the novel and Demetrio’s men were slaughtered in a final battle (Azuela, 2006). With this in mind, the struggle of the Mexican people can be likened to what Dr. Paul Farmer called “a long defeat” in reference to his work with desperately poor Haitians (Kidder, 2003). While Farmer has made significant strides forward towards the amelioration of the conditions of disease and poverty, the struggle continues, tough and metaphorically violent (Kidder, 2003). Nevertheless, The Underdogs does not altogether despair the outcome of the Revolutión. Instead, the novel is a call to struggle within the context of savage existential realities known by the oppressed in every place in the world. Alberto Solís, who joined Demetrio’s band of revolutionaries long after he had been profoundly disappointed with the struggle, sums up this spirit: “How beautiful the Revolution is, even in its savagery!”

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Wood, A G (Winter 2001). Anticipating the colonias: popular housing in El Paso and
Ciudad Juarez, 1890-1923. Journal of the Southwest, 43, 4. p.493(12).

Mountain Beyond Mountains

2008-03-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, became interested in the life of Dr. Paul Farmer in 1994 after learning a little bit about him on a plane ride from Haiti to Miami, FL; Kidder had been in Haiti doing research for an article about US soldiers sent to Haiti to restore peace and reinstate democracy after the coup d'état of 1991, which deposed democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Farmer, 2004; Kidder, 2003, p. 3). By Kidder’s own account, once he had a basic understanding of Dr. Farmer's background, history and how Farmer chose to use the expertise gained by way of his prestigious Harvard education, which includes both an MD and a PhD in Anthropology, he was drawn to the man and wanted to tell his story (Rogal, 2006).

Once Kidder established that he wanted to write about Farmer, he began his research, spending time with the Doctor as he traveled between his practice in Haiti and his other responsibilities in the United States. What Kidder learned about Farmer during this time is the subject of the book, but that subject is multifaceted and covers a wide range of social justice issues (Rogal, 2006).

The first issue of the book is health care access. In establishing Partners in Healthcare (PIH), which began as a small organization-- Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, Jim Young Kim, and Tom White-- the doctor and his friends coined the expression “a preferential [healthcare] option for the poor” (Kidder, 2003, p. 100; http://www.pih.org/home.html). It is this expression, coupled with the near radical “whatever it takes” mission statement of PIH that are a summation of how Farmer and his co-laborers understand their place in the struggle for worldwide health equity in the face of growing disparities among the rich and the poor in terms of outcomes (Farmer, 2004; http://www.pih.org/home.html).

Further magnifying the social justice issue of heath care access is the problem of the “twin epidemics” of HIV/AIDS and MDR-TB, which are worldwide among the poor (http://www.avert.org/aids-countries.htm). Haiti, the country where Farmer begins his work with MDR-TB and HIV/AIDS, is his main base of operation and also the poorest country in the Western hemisphere (Sletten and Egset, 2004). As Kidder explains, Farmer started traveling to Haiti on medical missions while still in school Thus, the worldwide struggle of PIH began for Dr. Farmer in the nation of Haiti, a place that he might call “home” (Kidder, 2003, p. 260).

If the first social justice issue in this book is health care access then the second is certainly poverty, though it seems unlikely that Kidder would rank one above the other in telling the story of Paul Farmer. It is more likely that Kidder would say of Farmer that the amelioration of the conditions suffered by human beings because of poverty as the doctor's raison d'être (Kidder, 2003, p. 185). Certainly the activity of his work in this regard is in health care both on individual and macro levels, but Mountain Beyond Mountains is nonetheless full of meaty tidbits from Dr. Farmer on the subject of the injustice of poverty and its effect on those stuck in it. This focused work and “preference” for the poor is institutionalized in the care model of PIH (Kidder, 2003, p. 253-54; http://www.pih.org/home.html).

Dr. Farmer’s interest in Haiti as a base for his preference for the poor lead him to write a book on the subject entitled The Uses of Haiti. In this book, mentioned briefly by Kidder, Dr. Farmer narrates the history of colonization and slavery in the nation and tells the story of three Haitians who are plagued by abstract forces related to history, politics, and economics manifested in their lives on a daily basis (Kidder, 2003; Multinational Monitor, 1995). Many times in Mountains Beyond Mountains Kidder provides a glimpse of Dr. Farmer’s thinking on the plight of everyday Haitians. But it is in chapter twelve that Kidder describes some of the topics covered in The Uses of Haiti in the context of Farmer’s work at his clinic in Haiti (Kidder, 2003, p. 116-119).

For Paul Farmer, two main “abstract factors” contribute to the plight of poor Haitians: the history of U.S. occupation and intervention, and the legacy of slavery. According to Farmer subsequent to the official end of the occupation of Haiti in 1934 the U.S. support of the rule of an ethic minority government comprised of Haitian mulattoes whose ancestors had fought in the French revolution in hopes of being able to become slave owners in Haiti (http://countrystudies.us/haiti/; Kidder, 2003, p. 117; Farmer 2004).

This “legacy” of slavery that the Haitian population lives in is described by Farmer more thoroughly in an article he wrote for the London Review of Books: “Haitians are still living with the legacy of the slave trade and of the revolt that finally removed the French” (Farmer, 2004). Nevertheless, while Dr. Farmer is described in the book as counting foreign intervention (not the least of which is U.S. intervention) as a major component of factors contributing to epidemic poverty in Haiti, he called for military intervention in Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 overthrow of Aristide. Farmer is described as against foreign intervention which maintains the status quo’ but in favor of interventions which ameliorate historical injustices suffered by the poor in Haiti (Kidder, 2003, p. 118; Lysaught, 2005).

Beyond his call for military intervention to alleviate “warlike” condition in Haiti after the coup, Mountains Beyond Mountains also tell the story of a doctor who is deeply interested in caring for the poor and sick wherever they may reside in the world (Kidder, 2003, p. 119, 184).

It is in the 23rd chapter that Kidder describes the many travels that Dr. Farmer makes in his pursuit to, as the subtitle of the book suggests “cure the world” (Kidder, 2006). On his travels during this “month” Kidder describes an interesting exchange between Dr. Farmer and a Russian general.

In their conversation the general asks him if America is a democracy and the doctor responds, “I think that whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy to call themselves democratic.… I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, the sick people are not among the rich” (Kidder, 2003, p. 229). It can be safely assumed that Dr. Famer might then agree that the principle difference between the poor in the United States and the poor in Haiti is this privilege enjoyed simply because of living in a wealthy country.

According to the federal poverty guidelines established by the US Department of Human Services (DHS) a person living in the United States can be in poverty and still have an income of $10, 210 per year and be considered impoverished (http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/07poverty.shtml). Compare that dollar amount with the guidelines used by Sletten and Egset to measure poverty in Haiti, 1 and 2 dollars per day, and the difference between “privilege” and extreme poverty is plain to see (2004, p. 6). On the other hand, the DHS reports that at least 12% of people living the United States fall below the poverty line (Poverty in the United States, 2007).

Still, there is a historical similarity between the poor of Haiti and the people who are at risk of poverty, at least by DHS standards, in the United States (Zinn, 1997). This similarity, of course, is the legacy of slavery and how that past contributes to the disparities between the “rich” and the “poor” in the United States and in Haiti (Zinn, 1997). American slavery institutionalized the idea that some human beings were less human and more disposable than other human beings in the Three Fifths Compromise of 1789. Similarly, the poor of Haiti, according to Kidder, have suffered oppression and worldwide marginalization because of their history of having been mostly the subjugated class under various masters and oppressors (p.116-117). Kidder further explains Farmer’s view on the weight of how dark skinned people have been oppressed by giving him words that express his viewpoint: “…if you say that sevens hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world” (p. 294).

Kidder, in narrating the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, gives the reader many lessons about social justice and social action. Two that may stand out to readers are the ideal of giving a preference for the poor in helping and the ideal that people of privilege should be working to ameliorate the plight of the world’s desperately poor (Kidder, 2003, p. 289). Farmer has modeled these two points of action in a extreme way that he does not intend to be a “manual” for others; instead, Kidder explains that Farmer wants to serve as proof that “seemingly intractable problems could be solved” (p. 244).

The idea that Farmer is not the manual for helping but “the proof” might bring to mind some of an ethical concern that his lifestyle almost forces readers to examine about their own lives. Kidder describes how staffers at PIH made the decision to medevac a patient from Port-au-Prince to Boston to receive treatment at a cost of $18, 540 dollars (Kidder, 2003, p. 269). Later, when Kidder asks the Doctor about the cost involved in the medevac with regard to how that money could have been spent more wisely, perhaps, Farmer presents the ethical dilemma, “Talk about all the money that could have been spent on other things, what about a doctor’s salary?... …Gee, my salary is give times John’s airplane ride cost… if you say that stuff out loud, you sound like an asshole. Whereas if you say the other stuff [that the $18, 540 dollars was perhaps too much to spend on just one poor person], you just sound thoughtful” (p. 289). Insight of this kind forces people to think about glaring disparities where excess resources held by people in positions of privilege harm the poor and vulnerable of the world (Kidder, 2003, p. 195).

The implications for Social Work practice drawn from the life of Paul Farmer are threefold. First, Dr. Farmer’s life is an example of a life committed to action to “prevent and eliminate domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against any person,” especially in the area of healthcare access (Social Work Code of Ethics). This should be the mandate of any person in the Social Work profession. Second, Dr. Farmer’s life is an example of a person who understands his position of privilege and how that position is in some ways a call to help humans being less fortunate than ourselves (Kidder, 2003, p. 229). And last, Dr. Farmer’s life serves as an example that the establishment can be challenged with positive results—as when PIH was able, over time, to help the World Health Organization (WHO) understand that MDR-TB could and should be treated in poor countries, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary (Kidder, 2003, pp. 165-177).

Mountains Beyond Mountains is an extraordinary and inspirational book. The life of Dr. Farmer challenges conventional wisdom with regard to how we address global issues of disparities in health care with overlap to almost any inequity faced by the world’s disadvantaged populations. Helping professionals will be challenged by this book to examine their own lives with regard to what cost they are willing to pay for helping in comparison to Dr. Paul Farmer’s “whatever it takes” mentality (www.pih.org).

References

Farmer, Paul (2004, April 15). Who removed Aristide? London Review of Books, Retrieved December 4, 2007, from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/farm01_.html#footnotes

Lysaught, M. T. (Feb 11, 2005). The Good Doctor. Commonweal, 132, 3. p.28(2). Retrieved December 04, 2007, from Academic OneFile via Gale: http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=AONE

Perry, H B, King-Schultz, L W, Aftab, A S, & Bryant, J H (August 1, 2007). Health
equity issues at the local level: Socio-geography, access, and health outcomes in the service area of the Hopital Albert Schweitzer-Haiti.(Research). International Journal for Equity in Health, 6, 7. p.7.

Poverty in the United States. (2007, December 2). In Wikipedia. Retrieved 21:53,
December 4, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poverty_in_the_United_States&oldid=175312098

Rogal, Margi (Ed.) (2006). Background Information on Mountains Beyond Mountains by
Tracy Kidder (website). Retrieved December 4, 2007, from http://www.augustana.edu/Library/Research/Guides/MBM-guide.html

Sletten, Pal and Willy Egset (2004). Poverty in Haiti. Fafo, 2004: 31, p. 27 (web edition paper). Retrieved December 4, 2007, from http://www.fafo.no/pub/rapp/755/index.htm

The Uses of Haiti. Jan-Feb 1995 v16 n1-2 p36(1) Multinational Monitor, 16, n1-
2. p. 36(1). Retrieved December 04, 2007, from Academic OneFile via Gale:
http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=AONE

Zinn, H. (1997). A People's History of the United States. New York: New Press.

The Working Poor

2008-03-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

Shipler, David K. The Working Poor. Random House: New York, 2004.

What is the nature and extent of the social problems (and/or policy issues) dealt with in the book?
Retired New York Times reporter and Professor David K. Shipler’s 2004 book might have been titled something like “stories from the future silent majority” because his qualitative research was gathered from a segment of the U.S. population that he and others have called “The Working Poor,” a demographic that has grown to more than fifty percent of the working population in 17 states (Fong, 2005). Shipler collected his data by asking people who “were willing to talk” to talk about themselves and tell the stories of their lives, the only qualification being that they were poor and that they were working (An Interview with David K. Shipler, 2004). This led him to various places in the United States where he interviewed people working in the garment industry, in factories, the service industry and in migrant farming. What he discovered was that among America’s working poor, work often doesn’t “work” for a variety of cultural and sociological reasons.

In fact, some might see chapter two, entitled “Work Doesn’t Work,” as the foundation of the book where Shipler is able to summarize the main social problem that he is attempting to illustrate. It is in this chapter that Shipler describes the working poor as often not able make ends meet despite the fact that they work long hours. As Ron Suskind notes in his review of the book, “There are 35 million people in the country living in poverty. Most of the adults of the adults in that group work nowadays; many of them work full time. And while there are heavy concentrations of African-American and white single mothers in the mix, the group is every bit as diverse, and diffuse, as the nation itself” (Suskind, 2004).

It is also in this chapter that he introduces the reader to the reality that there are disparate reasons for the plight of the working poor, including financial, but not limited to strictly the fact that low wages don’t provide working people with the basic necessities required to have a somewhat comfortable and secure life in the United States (Acs, Phillips, and McKenzie, 2000). Other reasons Shipler points out are the ravages of lack of quality education, abuse, poor housing situations and malnutrition coupled with the gross indifference of the state.

To illustrate the complexities of his message regarding the working poor, Shipler uses the story of Christie, a day care worker making $330 every two weeks watching children—a work function that “fuels America’s prosperity” and the two parent work-a-day world that the U.S. has become (Shipler, 2004, p. 39). Christie’s story casts light on the social problem well because in her case the reader is introduced to the limited job prospects that a “mere” high school graduate can reasonably achieve, the weaknesses of the welfare reform era system, and what “Congress and the White House… [see]… as poverty’s cause and solution,” namely the poor and “work,” respectively (Shipler, 40). What goals did the author try to achieve by writing the book?

Clearly, Shipler’s goal was to point out the indifference of contemporary state policies regarding the plight of the working poor. Policy since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 has centered on getting people off of welfare caseloads and into the workforce while mainly ignoring the fact that entry level jobs, by and large, do not pay enough to keep people out of the welfare system they are being excluded from (Fong, 2005). As E. Willard Miller, professor of Economic Geography at Penn State said, “America has become a nation of people where all able person who can work, do, but many cannot make ends meet” (Fong, 2005).

How effectively does the book cover the subject of poverty, social policy, etc?
Shipler’s effectiveness in achieving his goal in writing The Working Poor stems from years as a professional reporter. He deals with social policy in the “trenches” via the stories of the poor people who are working and willing to talk to him. For instance, when dealing with the issues around malnutrition— which is only an economic policy issue in the United States, not a food issue— he retells the stories that pediatricians at Boston Medical Center’s ambulatory care center told him regarding the cases they treat. He gives their honest assessments of the reasons why they see so many malnourished babies “failing to thrive” while pointing out the economic disparities that give a context for malnourished babies in a country overflowing with food (Shipler, 2004, pp. 201-205).

Using the same style, Shipler effectively takes up the issue of public education policy in the United States in Chapter nine: “Dreams.” He retells the “dreams” expressed by the mainly African American children, students of the poverty-ridden middle school where he did his interviews, who stated that they had “dreams” of becoming doctors, lawyers, professional sports player, etc., but the reality was that many of the students Shipler talked to would not even graduate from high school (Shipler, 2004, p. 232). By interviewing the children about their dreams and then interviewing teachers, Shipler is able to effectively give reader the grim picture concerning what most consider the disaster of the public education system in low income communities.

What are the primary strengths and weaknesses?
A weakness of the book is likely the partisanism that Shipler displays at various places in the text. While it is likely that most persons reading this particular book will be sympathetic to his arguments, a wide brush stroke against the “other half” of the political system is unwise when seeking real social and political change as wide sweeping as Shipler is calling for. Still, one might find see the same kind of partisanism to be strength if the purpose is to energize the left towards more vocal political action against the unjust policies of the right.

The major strength of the book is the way Shipler, an expert writer with many years of experience, uses the anecdotal evidence to make his point regarding the sometimes abysmal state of America’s working poor. The stories are poignant and are written in a way that seems to connect readers emotionally to the persons who are telling their stories. For instance, in his almost counterintuitive chapter entitled “Work Works” he gives the reader hope that there is something that can be done about the disparate problems facing the working poor in America. The story of “Peaches,” a person who faced most of the issues that Shipler describes in the book (i.e. financial issues, physical abuse, homelessness, mental health, etc.) , who was being trained by a non-profit organization dedicated to the amelioration of many social justice issues in the Washington DC community is good example of this strength of Shipler’s to give the reader hope and motivation towards action (Shipler, 2004, p. 255).

How well does the book relate to the information that has been discussed in class?
Because The Working Poor does give the reader hope towards action against injustice it serves as a good compliment to the readings we have had in class. Most of the anecdotes in the book can be substantiated with the quantitative research and peer reviewed articles that have been read for the class. This is the case with poverty numbers, as in the CPPP articles, the Social Security SSI program, food stamps, TANF—almost every public policy issue we have discussed in class are discussed and put into context in the book. This context gives a new dimension to the impersonal numbers and policy regulations which we have looked at in the classroom.
What are the most important social policy lessons that you took from this book?

The principle message of the book concerning policy is found in the last chapter of the book where Shipler outlines his conclusions concerning both the state of the working poor in America and what actions need to be taken in order to ameliorate the problems. His argument is that we have the “skill” in America but not the “will.” Considering that the subject of the “working poor” addresses an interconnectedness of many, many disparate social policy problems he makes an excellent point, which has been brought to mind many discussions around just why the state does not do more toward eliminating poverty in the United States compared to say, the defense budget.

Shipler’s answer to the question is a bipartisan one: he suggests that with the many, many disparate problems come the need for many, many difference governmental programs and non-profit community action in comprehensive collaboration, or as he suggests, “holistic remedies” that will force activists into policy discussions with people with both conservative and liberal values. This is the main policy topic that Shipler intends to make and is a challenge to those willing to go out and leverage whatever social capital is available towards creating the political will to further the cause of progress for the working poor (Shipler, 2004, p. 2004).

Any policy and program ideas you may have for the book?
In my own professional life I have been working with people who used to be called workforce intermediaries. Private workforce intermediaries do the same work that the Texas Workforce commission attempts to do under the auspices of “work first.” Organizations like Capital IDEA in Austin and other workforce intermediary organizations serve the working poor by providing a host of wrap around services that Shipler promotes in the last couple of chapters in his book. In the case of Capital IDEA, whom I am most familiar with; work is done both along policy development lines and program lines and corresponds, roughly, to the work done by the faith based organization So Others Might Eat (SOME) described in Chapter 10 of the book.

With regard to the many social policy issues described in the book, the holistic approach of a job training program within the context of intensive, wrap around case management has been shown to help motivated adults move from low income dead end job into high skill careers Capital IDEA directly addresses the problem low wages, soft skill development for job training, high skills education from the GED level to the Associates Degree with a high degree of success (http://www.capitalidea.org). Because of the success of the program, Capital IDEA was able to effect change in Travis county policy with regard to the budget. Because the County values the work of Capital IDEA and because of its effectiveness in putting people into the workforce, Travis has agreed for the last 10 years to fund the program in increasing amounts each year to over six hundred thousand dollars in 2005 (Jackobs, 2005).

A rural model should be developed to compliment the work done by urban workforce intermediary organizations like Capital IDEA. The rural model would target low income adults living in rural communities like the one described in Chapter 7 of the book: “Kinship.” It would also be a comprehensive program focusing on the development people through high skills education for occupations needed immediately in the workforce. Low income participants would be recruited from the various rural communities and sponsored to attend a central community college in a “county seat.” While going to college, participants would meet with case managers and receive training in job development and soft skills training for the workplace weekly.

For example, a workforce organization might establish its offices in Victoria, Texas where there are the campuses of Victoria College and the University of Houston VC, which has a robust RN program. From the county seat of Victoria case workers might be able to recruit from the surrounding small towns of Ganado, Sea Drift, Port Lavaca, etc. where there are more “working poor” than there is work. Part of the mission in recruiting the rural poor in these communities would be to help the rural poor to think about the possibilities of leaving or staying in their largely jobless communities in search of a better life— this is where the intensive case management comes into play.

The rural model would have to have a much larger area of focus in order to serve many different communities and people in and around the county seat college but would ameliorate some of the issues surrounding being poor, having a poverty mentality, and being cut off from the many of the resources available in large urban areas—essentially many of the issues addressed in Shipler’s The Working Poor.

References
Acs, Gregory, Katherin Ross Phillips, and Daniel McKenzie. (2000). Playing By the Rules But Losing the Game. Urban Institute. Retrieved March 18, 2008, from http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410404&renderforprint=1

An Interview With David K. Shipler. (2004). The New York Times (Audio). Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/audiopages/2004/02/15/books/20040215_SHIPLER.html

Fong, Vicki. (2005). Number of working poor families growing in America. Pen State Live. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http://live.psu.edu/story/12714

Jackobs, Steve. (2005). Capital IDEA Annual Report (Report). Retrieved March 18, 2008, from http://www.capitalidea.org/downloads/pdfs/2005%20Report.pdf

Suskind, Ron. (2004). The Working Poor: Can’t Win for Losing. The New York Times.