grippingly authentic!

We’re interested in a bit of civil disobedience now and then, in people willing to cause a scene and step out of the “normal” and accepted operating procedure, out of the standard mode of being. We’re not terribly impressed with the standard mode of being, to be honest. We don’t claim that everyone is out there sleepwalking, making poor choices, but it’s impossible to ignore a certain apathy inherent in our mode of being these days. We won’t theorize (at the moment, anyway – maybe we’ll save the soap-boxing for our own megaphone experiments) as to the myriad reasons which foster that apathy, but we will say that we love to see and hear people express themselves intelligently, and we commend them when they do so in the name of positive social change.

Please help our brothers and sisters in Haiti by giving to Doctors Without Borders.

Photo by Lisandro Suero / AFP / Getty Images

Hostess Cupcakes by Pamela Johnson. Oil on canvass – 64″ X 64″ – 2007

Although some positive changes have been made, and we’re not expecting eight years of poor leadership and corrupt government to be erased in a year, at a time when the public option has all but been extinguished and the bankers made obscene profits by treading heavily on the backs of the working man, we want to see more. And we don’t want to wait. What follows is an email we received from Ralph Nader, who we still think would have made a great president:

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 BC) said that “character is destiny.” He might have added that “personality is decisive.” Where is Barack Obama in this framework?

The venerable historian, James MacGregor Burns, in his book “Transforming Leadership,” drew an important distinction between “transforming and transactional leadership,” and calling Franklin Delano Roosevelt a reflection of the former genre.

Given all the burgeoning crises in the United States and the world, the only global military and economic superpower (albeit in serious deficit straits) needs a transforming leader, when, at best, it has a transactional leader in the White House.

I say “at best,” because President Obama displays an uncanny inability to deal. He is not even anywhere near Lyndon Baines Johnson in that regard. This lack is due more to his personality than to his character.

His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict and to taking on entrenched power, a devotee of harmony ideology not because he doesn’t believe in necessary re-directions, but because he does not project the strength of his beliefs and willingness to draw the line—here and no further—as did Ronald Reagan or FDR.

In the shark tank known as the federal Washington, D.C. Obama’s personality projects weakness as someone who does not take a stand and fight, as someone inclined to rely on his rhetoric to explain his withdrawals, retreats and reversals. Some examples follow.

First, the President has been openly for single payer health insurance (full Medicare for all with free choice of physician and hospital) since before he became a politician. His friends included single payer leaders such as the stalwart Dr. Quentin Young in Chicago.

So, instead of starting with “single payer,” he descends to vague policy declarations, asks Congress to come up with a specific bill, while cutting private deals in meetings in the White House with drug industry and health insurance executives.

Now months later, with Blue Dog Democrats emboldened, with his progressive wing angry and starting to rebel, a hoked up insurance bill is having many provisions eviscerated. Once the Republicans smelled his lack of resolve, his wavering on one amendment after another, they became ravenous in their demands and obstructions.

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From the Wholphin YouTube channel, Baby Squid, Born Like Stars :

And from Bob Sabiston of Flat Black Films, Grasshopper :

“You can’t run a democracy with a citizenry that really doesn’t know how to make valid decisions. Most people don’t know what decision theory is, they don’t know what maximization of utility is. We live in a highly complex technological world and it’s not entirely obvious what is right and wrong in any given situation unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don’t have the insight to do that very effectively. We have to have an educated and intelligent citizenry, which I regret to say we don’t necessarily have at the present time.”

- Christopher Langan, bouncer/ smart guy, from the Errol Morris series First Person, 2000

On November 9th of 2007, in Baltimore, Maryland, Thomas Schwandt, professor and Educational Psychology Department Chair at the University of Illinois, delivered the plenary address at the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association before 1,600 of his colleagues. He modestly told us it was very well received. (Others told us he blew the doors off the place.) We here at grippinglyauthentic! came across a revised version of the speech as it was published in the American Journal of Evaluation in 2008, titled ”Educating for Intelligent Belief in Evaluation.” It was also quite well received by us. In fact, we were amazed, and decided to do all we could to help what we feel is an important paper, and an important voice, reach beyond the insular circle of academia (have you ever heard of the American Journal of Evaluation?) and into the heads of anyone who feels, as we do, that the critical thinking skills of the public at large are diminishing faster than one can tweet about their favorite breakfast cereal.

Tom’s excellent speech directly addressed so many of our concerns and raised so many questions that we nearly bombarded him, and he was good enough to respond at length with his thoughts on the general themes we raised in our questions. And we happily share his thoughts with you. He was also good enough to share an early version of his speech, which you can read here. It deserves some time. You can also find out more about the published speech, and subscribe to the journal to read the speech here.

And now, grippinglyauthentic! yields the floor to Tom Schwandt:

“I am at best an amateur social theorist, but it does not take the wisdom of Minerva to recognize that social life and public well-being in general these days seems particularly plagued by a set of interrelated problems that, simply for the sake of convenience, I will call a decline in civility, an inability (or unwillingness) to engage in critical thinking, an abandonment of personal responsibility, and a failure of moral courage. These are by no means new problems but they seem to be particularly acute of late. We see them manifest in many ways.

Perhaps most notable of late is the decline in civil behavior. The ratcheting up of rhetoric in the health care debate, the substitution of fear mongering for facts and reason, Joe Wilson’s outburst, etc. are but the latest examples. Last week, my local paper featured two stories that, juxtaposed, make my point. One was a op ed column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. on the shouting, threats, and general chaos that has erupted in town hall meetings over health care—a story carried in the NY Times and elsewhere—as well as the fear mongering, notably Sarah Palin’s Facebook claim that Democrats are posing a downright evil health care system in which the fate of the elderly and disabled would be decided by government ‘death panels.’ The other was an AP news story reporting a study that appeared in JAMA indicating that offering end-of-life counseling to dying cancer patients improves their mood and quality of life. Put side-by-side the two stories tell the story—civil unruliness instead of reasoned debate; the abandonment of the hard work necessary for careful critical thought in favor of easily championed and shouted ideology. Of course, I am all for civil protest—democracy is messy. But civil protest is not equivalent to incivility. Civil protest has a real place in altering the way we think about what it is right to do—a powerful case in point is the loud and very visible protest of AIDS activists in the early 1990s. That kind of protesting, that challenged scientists to take patients’ perspectives seriously, changed the science of the treatment of AIDS.

“Spin on both political and scientific issues has reached an art form. It is clearly a bipartisan undertaking, and it is, paradoxically, both fostered and checked by the proliferation of weblogs.”

From “Educating for Intelligent Belief in Evaluation”

I see the kind of incivility I speak of above linked to an inability or unwillingness to engage in critical thinking, that is the capacity to make reasoned arguments based on logic and evidence. Shouting and screaming talking points that one has been provided is far easier than doing some hard thinking and reasoned analysis and engaging in discussion and debate. No real new news here either—the anti-intellectualism of the American public is an old story (but most recently updated by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason). Chris Mooney’s recent entry on American’s scientific illiteracy, Unscientific America, is a current case in point of the inability of citizens in general and many professionals as well to evaluate evidence. For a view of how to get better at that sort of thing one need only turn to one of the many very accessible books by Joel Best or take a look at statlit.org.

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“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap and lazy.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. from A Man Without a Country, 2005

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” - Ansel Adams

Mixed media shadow box and photographs by Ross Martens - 2009

We hate to be a bother dear, but have you made those telephone calls yet? No? Have you had a gander at this?

And if the “Armey of Darkness” isn’t enough to blow your top, how about these apples? If you watch closely at 2:04, you’ll see a positively fervent crowd, those teabaggers with their full throated patriotism on display. But what’s all this then?

We can’t get enough of producer Heidi Noonan’s deer-in-the-headlights moment. Even behind those large sunglasses, the flash of realization is unmistakable; she freezes, plays with her hair in an awkward attempt at nonchalance and…Ducks out of sight! Maybe Fox really does believe it’s own dog and pony show. And perhaps their interpretation of “objective journalism” suggests that if you vanish from the camera frame, you have rendered yourself invisible, thus negating the fact that you’ve just been caught whipping up the crowd at a “grass roots, concerned citizen’s rally” like an audience co-ordinator on the Price is Right. “That wasn’t me! I wasn’t there! You didn’t just see that! It never happened!”

This is a peek behind the curtain, a look at the method to their madness. They will do anything to make sure things stay the way they are. All you have to do is pick up the phone.

Okay, look, this health care thing? Something must be done.

This is a huge issue in and of itself, but healthcare is much more than just a political issue; how we chose to take care of ourselves, how we chose to take care of each other, speaks to who we are as a nation, who we are as citizens and what citizenship means to us. And right now, the only ones making noise are the people bringing loaded guns to town halls, screaming about death panels and health care for illegal immigrants. If you watch any coverage of these antics, including the march on D.C., it’s easy to eye-roll and be completely floored by the dearth of facts. But you cannot deny the passion; it’s misguided and ill-informed, but it’s organized and it’s making itself heard. As Bill Maher asked, “When are we going to show up?”

We need real reform. We don’t need a plan that would make some sort of weak-ass coverage mandatory, enriching the very companies that are profiting off the health—or ill health—of our citizens. The people descending upon D.C. this past weekend are right about at least one thing: this is bigger than health care. What they don’t understand is that their talking-points are being fed to them by the very people whose interests lie in killing universal health care. This is about how big businesses, as Bill Moyers said, “run roughshod over the interests of ordinary people.”

Call your reps. Call them all. Not just the ones you voted for, call the ones in office that you didn’t vote for, too. They were elected to serve you. It’s your job to insist that they do. If you’re lucky enough to have a doctor, call them and ask them what they think about universal health care. The majority of doctors supported single-payer health care in 2008. Many of them still do, but since that’s off the table (ha-whaaa?),  many doctors and nurses support a public option.

As Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Slant has written, “It seldom happens that the public is awake and focused enough to have this kind of OK Corral confrontation with the DC oligarchy, and it has to take advantage.” And, “Progressives this week are fighting to accumulate the votes needed to stop any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. Hopefully they can stop this PhRMA payoff as well. If you’ve got a phone, call your congressman and give him/her hell about this…”

Patients gather outside the Virginia-Kentucky Fairgrounds for their turn to enter the Remote Area Medical (RAM) Health Expedition in Wise, Va., July 24, 2009. Photo by Paul Morse for AARP Bulletin Today (Click image to read story.)

Not too long ago, we spoke with a congresswoman who told us, quite frankly, that online petitions simply don’t have the impact of a personal phone call. There are some great organizations working to inform and mobilize people through the internet, but a few clicks of a mouse will not capture the attention of elected officials as much as your individual voice or a handwritten letter. There is something about having your congressman’s/woman’s phone ringing off the hook with their constituent’s concerns (and their future votes) that still has the power to move. (For how much longer is up for debate.) Maybe scores of emails are super easy to delete without reading? Perhaps government officials are leery of a form which is easily manipulated? Any dedicated lemming could fill one out a hundred times a day, and probably has. Well, we could ponder this until we’re all forced underground by an empire of evil robots bearing the Pfizer logo, but the fact remains that you, concerned citizen and (hopefully) galvanized reader of this sometimes activism-slanted page, need to pick up the phone and give your representatives what for.

There are many Astroturf organizations which send out alarmist emails on a regular basis, urging their minions to “shut down senators switch boards” with their demands. But you, informed, intelligent, polite person, with sincere concerns and hopes for a more perfect union, need to make your thoughts heard and understood. Right now. If you’re comfortable sitting, watching, and venting your frustrations with the people you know, the people who agree with you, as Howard Zinn said, you are in collaboration with the very thing you oppose. It is every person’s civic duty to speak as loud and clear as possible, to insist that your voice is integral to the health of your nation. We’ve seen plenty of civil disobedience from those who already hold the power, who pollute the water, who have broken our schools and dirtied our air; if we sit quietly by while they take away our health, we may not have enough patriotism left in us to ever raise our voices again. It could be that it’s simply time to stop being so polite. Be as sincere in your actions as you are in your concerns.

“The political system in the country today is so encrusted with bureaucracy, special interests, waste, and inefficiency, that what you have to do is step back and start by trying to help organize people and try to get them to see citizenship as a profession…”

- Ralph Nader on The Mike Douglas Show, 1972

Painting by Scott Johnson. Oil on linen – 54″ X 42″ – 2008

“I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants.”

- Al Gore, speaking to youth at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference, 2008

“I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

- Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking to organizers presenting him with a set of demands, 1932

At first glance, Scott Urban looks like he just walked out of the woods to personally hand you a manifesto of indeterminate ideology which he has just finished writing. He’s kind of dirty; his fingernails, his clothes, maybe even his hair, and he wears a sometimes gnarly beard which he likes to stroke when he becomes engaged in conversation. Upon engaging him, however, it becomes clear that he is not, in fact, some sort of plot-devising back-woods dweller who grows his own psychedelic mushrooms. Rather, he is an artist.

When he told us (your grippinglyauthentic! correspondents) that he relocated his workshop to Chicago’s River North neighborhood, we were more than a little surprised. He had been running his business, Urban Spectacles, out of a 100 year-old Rogers Park home which was, to say the least, in disrepair. The home still had it’s amazing vintage features – ornately carved wooden pillars and built-ins, unpainted crown molding throughout the main floor, and ceilings high enough to fly a kite in – but aside from that, the place was falling apart, which fit him perfectly. Urban, who for the last five years has sustained himself by designing and hand-carving spectacles of wood, vinyl, and aluminum, also appears to be in a near constant state of something like disrepair, maybe dishevelment.

“These people are not going to know what the hell happened to the corner of Orleans and Huron,” he laughed.

River North is an exponentially more wealthy neighborhood than Rogers Park. It’s the Gallery District: clean, safe, polished and professional (Tiffany Kim is right around the corner); Knowing the neighborhood, with its posh galleries and lofts, the new high-rises and upscale restaurants, we thought maybe Urban was leaving his  roots in dilapidation and moving up in the world, maybe turning his small, homegrown business into something more. After stepping into his new workshop, however, we were reassured to the contrary - at least about the dilapidation.

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