Sal Khan & the Muppets’ Grover Explain the Electoral College

in Current Affairs, K-12, Politics | November 4th, 2016

Grover, the more intel­lec­tu­al­ly-aspi­rant of Sesame Street’s two blue mon­sters, is a self-appoint­ed expert on anato­my (“the head is cov­ered with this long stringy stuff”), hygiene, and Span­ish, but the work­ings of the Unit­ed States Elec­toral Col­lege elud­ed him, until Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Acad­e­my wan­dered into the frame.

The pairing’s not as odd as you might think. The Khan Academy’s mis­sion is in many ways quite sim­i­lar to that of Sesame Street—free edu­ca­tion for the peo­ple, dis­trib­uted on a glob­al scale. Both are non-prof­it. The Khan Acad­e­my uses white­board screen­cast­ing where Sesame Street uses Mup­pets, but the goal is the same.

The ener­getic and high­ly dis­tractible Grover would be a chal­leng­ing pupil in any set­ting. Khan, whose teacher-stu­dent inter­ac­tions are rarely so face-to-face, han­dles him like a pro, wise­ly par­ing down a stan­dard issue Khan Acad­e­my les­son on the Elec­toral Col­lege to an eas­i­ly digestible three-and-a-half min­utes.

The take­away?

The Unit­ed States is an indi­rect democ­ra­cy.

Each state awards its elec­toral votes to the can­di­date who wins the pop­u­lar vote in that state.

The num­ber of elec­toral votes in any giv­en state is equal to its num­ber of con­gress­peo­ple plus its two Sen­a­tors.

There are a total of 538 elec­toral votes. In order to win the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, a can­di­date must win at least 270 of those votes.

Sim­ple enough, but this mea­sured expla­na­tion does not com­pute with Grover.

So Khan employs an edu­ca­tion­al Nin­ja tech­nique. “How can I explain it in a way that you might under­stand?” he asks.

It turns out Grover is some­thing of a visu­al learn­er, who’s not at all shy about the work­ings of his own per­son­al brain. He’s prob­a­bly not ready for 8th grade alge­bra, but the Khan Acad­e­my sub­sti­tu­tion method pro­vides a water­shed moment, when Khan replaces elec­toral votes with chick­ens.

(If your frag­ile grasp of the Elec­toral Col­lege process would be mud­dled by the intro­duc­tion of chick­ens, stop watch­ing at the two minute mark. As the pro­lif­er­at­ing com­ments on the Khan Academy’s fifth Amer­i­can Civics les­son prove, some­times the sim­ple approach cre­ates more ques­tions than it answers.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es 

Mor­gan Free­man Teach­es Kids to Read in Vin­tage Elec­tric Com­pa­ny Footage from 1971

Elec­tion 2012: Your Free Tick­et to a Pop­u­lar Stan­ford Course

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Father Writes a Great Letter About Censorship When Son Brings Home Permission Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Censored Book, Fahrenheit 451

in Current Affairs, Education, Literature, Politics | November 1st, 2016

book permission slip.jpg Ironic permission slip request https://twitter.com/i/moments/790703810427494400

How does cen­sor­ship come about in advanced, osten­si­bly demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties? In some cas­es, through insti­tu­tions col­lud­ing in ways that go unno­ticed by the gen­er­al pub­lic. As Noam Chom­sky has argued for decades, state agen­cies often col­lude with the press to spread cer­tain nar­ra­tives and sup­press oth­ers. And as we see dur­ing Banned Books Week, leg­is­la­tures, courts, and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions often col­lude with pub­lish­ers, teach­ers, and par­ents to sup­press lit­er­a­ture they view as threat­en­ing. One such case remains par­tic­u­lar­ly iron­ic giv­en the book in ques­tion: Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, the sto­ry of a dystopi­an soci­ety in which all books are banned, and fire depart­ments burn con­tra­band copies.

Between the years 1967 and 1979, Bal­lan­tine pub­lished an expur­gat­ed ver­sion of the nov­el for use in high schools, remov­ing con­tent deemed objec­tion­able. Brad­bury was com­plete­ly unaware. For six of those years, the bowd­ler­ized ver­sion was the only one sold by the pub­lish­er. We can remem­ber this case when we read the response of writer Daniel Radosh to a per­mis­sion slip his son Milo brought home from his 8th grade teacher for a book club read­ing of Fahren­heit 451. Writ­ten in Milo’s own hand, the ini­tial note, at the top, informs Mr. Radosh that the nov­el “was chal­lenged because of it’s [sic] theme of the ille­gal­i­ty and cen­sor­ship of books. One book peo­ple got most angry about was the burn­ing of the bible. Sec­ond­ly, there is a large amount of curs­ing and pro­fan­i­ty in the book.”

After this con­fes­sion, Milo’s note asks for a parental sig­na­ture in a post­script. Address­ing the let­ter’s true writer, Milo’s teacher, Daniel Radosh respond­ed thus, in the typed note attached to his son’s let­ter.

I love this let­ter! What a won­der­ful way to intro­duce stu­dents to the theme of Fahren­heit 451 that books are so dan­ger­ous that the insti­tu­tions of soci­ety – schools and par­ents – might be will­ing to team up against chil­dren to pre­vent them from read­ing one.

It’s easy enough to read the book and say, ‘This is crazy. It could nev­er real­ly hap­pen,’ but pre­tend­ing to present stu­dents at the start with what seems like a total­ly rea­son­able ‘first step’ is a real­ly immer­sive way to teach them how insid­i­ous cen­sor­ship can be.

I’m sure that when the book club is over and the stu­dents realise the true intent of this let­ter they’ll be shocked at how many of them accept­ed it as an actu­al per­mis­sion slip.

In addi­tion, Milo’s con­cern that allow­ing me to add to this note will make him stand out as a trou­ble­mak­er real­ly brings home why most of the char­ac­ters find it eas­i­er to accept the world they live in rather than chal­lenge it.

I assured him that his teacher would have his back.

Radosh’s insin­u­a­tion that the let­ter his son was induced to write is not an “actu­al per­mis­sion slip” under­scores his claim that the exer­cise is real­ly a means of con­trol­ling chil­dren by means of col­lu­sion, even though, he jests, such a thing must be part of the les­son itself. Should he be allowed to read the nov­el, the sign­ing and deliv­ery of the per­mis­sion slip, Radosh dev­as­tat­ing­ly sug­gests, com­pletes Milo’s humil­i­a­tion, bring­ing home to him “why most of the char­ac­ters” in the book remain pas­sive, and “find it eas­i­er to accept the world they live in rather than chal­lenge it.”

In short, Radosh’s response, for all its pithy irony, digs deeply into the mech­a­nisms that sup­press speech deemed so “dan­ger­ous that the insti­tu­tions of society—schools and parents—might be will­ing to team up against chil­dren to pre­vent them” from read­ing it.

See Metro UK for a com­plete tran­scrip­tion of both let­ters.

via Vin­tage Anchor

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

The Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Cen­sored with Wear and Tear

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Prof. Brian Cox Has a Maddening Conversation with a Climate Science-Denying Politician

in Current Affairs, Environment, Science | August 22nd, 2016

Accord­ing to NASA’s God­dard Insti­tute for Space Stud­ies, July 2016 was the warmest month ever record­ed. 2016 will like­ly be the warmest year on record. And the decades ahead will only get worse, much worse.

And yet, notes physi­cist Lawrence Krauss in The New York­er this week­end, we have the GOP’s Franken­stein try­ing to dem­a­gogue his way into the pres­i­den­cy by call­ing cli­mate sci­ence into ques­tion. Krauss writes:

In May, for instance, while speak­ing to an audi­ence of West Vir­ginia coal min­ers, Trump com­plained that reg­u­la­tions designed to pro­tect the ozone lay­er had com­pro­mised the qual­i­ty of his hair spray. Those reg­u­la­tions, he con­tin­ued, were mis­guid­ed, because hair spray is used main­ly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmos­phere out­side.…

Often, Trump is sim­ply wrong about sci­ence, even though he should know bet­ter. Just as he was a per­sis­tent “birther” even after the evi­dence con­vinc­ing­ly showed that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was born in the Unit­ed States, Trump now con­tin­ues to prop­a­gate the notion that vac­cines cause autism in spite of con­vinc­ing and wide­ly cit­ed evi­dence to the con­trary… In oth­er cas­es, Trump treats sci­en­tif­ic facts the way he treats oth­er facts—he ignores or dis­torts them when­ev­er it’s con­ve­nient. He has denied that cli­mate change is real, call­ing it pseu­do­science and advanc­ing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that “the con­cept of glob­al warm­ing was cre­at­ed by and for the Chi­nese in order to make U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing non­com­pet­i­tive.”

And way across the pond, we have anoth­er politi­cian, Aus­tralian Sen­a­tor Mal­colm Roberts, mak­ing his own kind of laugh­able claims. In a recent tele­vi­sion broad­cast, Roberts asks physi­cist Bri­an Cox for empir­i­cal proof that cli­mate change exists. Cox offers evi­dence gath­ered by NASA, to which Roberts responds, NASA’s “data has been cor­rupt­ed and manip­u­lat­ed.” Not good enough. If you reg­u­lar­ly read our site, you know that this is not the first time that NASA has been accused of manip­u­lat­ing data. Con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have long accused NASA and Stan­ley Kubrick of fak­ing the moon land­ing in 1969. Roberts bris­tles at being asso­ci­at­ed with these loons. But frankly it’s an apt com­par­i­son. And if any­one should be both­ered by the com­par­i­son, it’s the moon land­ing con­spir­acists. How­ev­er strange their the­o­ries might be, no one doubts that they’re heart­felt, gen­uine, and seem­ing­ly free from the hint of polit­i­cal and finan­cial influ­ence.

In the mean­time, in a new video from NASA, you can see the Arc­tic ice lev­els retreat­ing to one of the low­est lev­els in record­ed his­to­ry. Call the video “cor­rupt­ed” and “manip­u­lat­ed” at your own per­il.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Michio Kaku & Noam Chom­sky School Moon Land­ing and 9/11 Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rists

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Sal­ly Ride Warns Against Glob­al Warm­ing; Won­ders If Tech­nol­o­gy Can Save Us From Our­selves

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Get a Free Pocket Edition of the U.S. Constitution (Now #2 on the Amazon Bestseller List)

in Books, Current Affairs | August 2nd, 2016

we the people

Going into the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, who would have thought that the speech we’d all remem­ber this week would belong to Khazir Khan, the father of a Mus­lim-Amer­i­can sol­dier who died fight­ing for the Unit­ed States in Iraq? Khan’s rebuke of Don­ald Trump’s divi­sive pres­i­den­tial cam­paign was sting­ing, and it came capped with these lines:

Don­ald Trump, you are ask­ing Amer­i­cans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion? I will glad­ly lend you my copy. In this doc­u­ment, look for the words “lib­er­ty” and “equal pro­tec­tion of law.”

Have you ever been to Arling­ton Ceme­tery? Go look at the graves of the brave patri­ots who died defend­ing Amer­i­ca — you will see all faiths, gen­ders, and eth­nic­i­ties.

You have sac­ri­ficed noth­ing and no one.

This pri­vate cit­i­zen suc­ceed­ed in doing what Hillary Clin­ton, Bill Clin­ton, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, Joe Biden and maybe even Michael Bloomberg could not. In his own mod­est, under­stat­ed way, he put Trump on the defen­sive. And when Trump lashed out, you could final­ly hear the whis­pers: Have you no sense of decen­cy, Don­ald, at long last?

Khizr Khan may be to Don­ald Trump what Joseph Welch was to Joe McCarthy. That would be one pos­i­tive out­come of Khan’s speech. The oth­er is that sales of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion (as Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture not­ed) have gone through the roof. The U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion is cur­rent­ly #2 on Ama­zon’s list of best­selling books, right behind the new Har­ry Pot­ter book. Fath­om that.

You, too, can buy a pock­et edi­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion. But why not get it for free? Through Novem­ber 8, the ACLU is run­ning a pro­mo­tion which will let you snag a free pock­et-sized Constitution–one that can fit in your back­pack, glove com­part­ment, or back pock­et. It mea­sures 3/12” x 5.5” and fea­tures “the full text of the Con­sti­tu­tion, the Amend­ments, includ­ing the Bill of Rights, as well as a Know Your Rights series: What to do if you’re stopped by the police.”

Head to this page, and use the coupon code POCKETRIGHTS.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R Crumb, the Father of Under­ground Comix, Takes Down Don­ald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Car­toon

J.K. Rowl­ing Defends Don­ald Trump’s Right to Be “Offen­sive and Big­ot­ed”

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Watch “Traffic Stop,” an Emmy-Nominated, Animated Film About a Traffic Stop Gone Horribly Wrong

in Animation, Current Affairs, Law, Life | August 1st, 2016

As the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment has come to occu­py a greater swath of America’s atten­tion span, a con­ver­sa­tion has arisen around the pit­falls of ally­ship, a term that lends itself to dis­cus­sions of gen­der and dis­abil­i­ty, as well as race.

Sim­ply put, the self-pro­claimed allies are mem­bers of a more priv­i­leged major­i­ty, eager to lend sup­port through word and deed.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, their enthu­si­asm often turns them into micro­phone hogs in what activist Princess Har­mo­ny Rodriguez has referred to as “ally the­ater.”

A num­ber of would-be allies con­fuse humil­i­ty with the seek­ing of brown­ie points. If they real­ly got it, those at the cen­ter of the move­ment say, they would not expect mem­bers of the minor­i­ty to rearrange their to-do lists to bring them up to speed on what it’s like to be a per­son of col­or (or a trans­gen­dered per­son or a dis­abled per­son).

Would-be allies are there­fore advised to step out of the spot­light, stuff a sock in it, and edu­cate them­selves, by work­ing to find exist­ing essays and nar­ra­tives, authored by those with whom they would be in sol­i­dar­i­ty.

Human nature ensures that tem­pers will flare and hurt feel­ings will be aired. The hor­ri­fy­ing social ill that gave rise to the movement—the shoot­ing of unarmed black men by those charged with pro­tect­ing the whole of the public—is elbowed off­stage, so that a phe­nom­e­non such as ally­ship can be the num­ber one top­ic of debate on col­lege cam­pus­es, web­sites, and social media.

“Traf­fic Stop,” above, pro­vides a rare moment of racial accord, stem­ming from yet anoth­er ghast­ly tale of police bru­tal­i­ty.

The short ani­ma­tion was born of a con­ver­sa­tion record­ed by Alex Lan­dau and Pat­sy Hath­away in a Sto­ryCorps booth, a mas­sive oral his­to­ry project designed to attract a wide diver­si­ty of par­tic­i­pants.

Lan­dau is African-Amer­i­can.

His adop­tive moth­er, Hath­away, is white.

Those who would clas­si­fy adopt­ing a child of anoth­er race as “ally­ship” must con­cede that, if so, it is cer­tain­ly of no casu­al stripe.

The events of Jan­u­ary 15, 2009, when Den­ver police stopped the 19-year-old Lan­dau and a white friend for mak­ing an ille­gal left turn, caused Hath­away to rethink the col­or­blind world­view she had espoused while rais­ing her son.

“I thought that love would con­quer all and skin col­or real­ly did­n’t mat­ter,” Hath­away tells Lan­dau. “I had to learn the real­ly hard way when they almost killed you.”

Had the attack hap­pened a few years lat­er, Landau’s friend might have man­aged to doc­u­ment the pro­ceed­ings with a cell phone, despite the hand­cuffs that were placed on him after a bag of mar­i­jua­na was found in his pock­et.

Instead, this ani­ma­tion, and the gris­ly graph­ic pho­to that fol­lows of Landau’s face pri­or to receiv­ing 45 stitch­es, will have to suf­fice. His rec­ol­lec­tion of the laugh­ter and racial epi­thets direct­ed his way as he lay bleed­ing on the ground are stom­ach-churn­ers, too.

Like his moth­er, Landau’s child­hood per­cep­tion of an all-inclu­sive, benev­o­lent world was shat­tered. They mourned it togeth­er when they were reunit­ed in the emer­gency room on the night of the ill-fat­ed traf­fic stop.

Look and lis­ten.

Then, if you are ready to wade into thornier ter­ri­to­ry, read the hun­dreds of com­ments view­ers have post­ed on youtube.

Ulti­mate­ly, the City of Den­ver award­ed Lan­dau a $795,000 set­tle­ment, while the Den­ver Police Depart­ment, cit­ing a lack of evi­dence, cleared all three offi­cers of mis­con­duct. Fol­low up arti­cles from 2011 and 2013 are avail­able here and here.

Traf­fic Stop was ani­mat­ed by  Gina Kamentsky & Julie Zam­marchi (read an inter­view with them here). It was recent­ly nom­i­nat­ed for an Emmy award last week.

via West­word

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Online Key Doc­u­ments from the Fer­gu­son Grand Jury: Wit­ness Tes­ti­mo­ny, Foren­sic Evi­dence & More

‘Tired of Giv­ing In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fin­ger­prints of Rosa Parks (Decem­ber 1, 1955)

Pep­per Spray­ing Peace­ful Pro­tes­tors Con­tin­ues; This Time at UC Davis

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Did Hitler Rise to Power? : New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | July 25th, 2016

How does one rise to pub­lic office? In part, by flat­ter­ing the sen­si­bil­i­ties of those one seeks to serve.

Do you appeal to their high­er nature, their sense of civic respon­si­bil­i­ty and inter­con­nect­ness?

Or do you cap­i­tal­ize on pre-exist­ing bias­es, stok­ing already sim­mer­ing fears and resent­ments to the boil­ing point?

The world paid a ghast­ly price when Germany’s Chan­cel­lor and even­tu­al Führer Adolf Hitler proved him­self a mas­ter of the lat­ter approach.

It seems like we’ve been hear­ing about Hitler’s rise to pow­er a lot late­ly… and not in antic­i­pa­tion of the fast-approach­ing 80th anniver­sary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

We must always resist the temp­ta­tion to over­sim­pli­fy his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly when doing so serves our own ends. There are way too many con­tribut­ing fac­tors to Hitler’s ascen­dan­cy to squeeze into a five minute ani­ma­tion.

On the oth­er hand, you can’t dump a ton of infor­ma­tion on people’s heads and expect them to absorb it all in one sit­ting. You have to start some­where.

TED-Ed les­son plan­ners Alex Gendler and Antho­ny Haz­ard, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Uncle Gin­ger ani­ma­tion stu­dio, offer a very cogent expla­na­tion of how “a tyrant who orches­trat­ed one of the largest geno­cides in his­to­ry” achieved such a calami­tous­ly pow­er­ful posi­tion. All in a demo­c­ra­t­ic fash­ion.

When view­ers have more than five min­utes to devote to the sub­ject, they can delve into addi­tion­al resources and par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions on the sub­ject.

The video doesn’t touch on Hitler’s men­tal ill­ness or the par­tic­u­lars of Weimar era polit­i­cal struc­tures, but even view­ers with lim­it­ed his­tor­i­cal con­text will walk away from it with an under­stand­ing that Hitler was a mas­ter at exploit­ing the Ger­man majority’s mood in the wake of WWI. (A 1933 cen­sus shows that Jews made up less than one per­cent of the total pop­u­la­tion.)

Hitler’s rep­u­ta­tion as a charis­mat­ic speak­er is dif­fi­cult to accept, giv­en hind­sight, mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties, and the herky-jerky qual­i­ty of archival footage. He seems unhinged. How could the crowds not see it?

Per­haps they could, Gendler and Haz­ard sug­gest. They just did­n’t want to. Busi­ness­men and intel­lec­tu­als, want­i­ng to back a win­ner, ratio­nal­ized that his more mon­strous rhetoric was “only for show.”

Quite an atten­tion-get­ting show, as it turns out.

Could it hap­pen again?  Gendler and Haz­ard, like all good edu­ca­tors, present stu­dents with the facts, then open the floor for dis­cus­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulte­ri­or Motive for Spread­ing Anti-Semi­tism

How Jazz-Lov­ing Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resist­ed Con­for­mi­ty in Nazi Ger­many

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopian Novel Features a Fascistic Presidential Candidate Who Promises to “Make America Great Again”

in Current Affairs, Politics, Sci Fi | July 21st, 2016

628px-Butler_signing

Image by Niko­las Couk­ouma, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The Inter­net has been abuzz and atwit­ter these past few months with sto­ries about prophet­ic pre­dic­tions of the rise of Trump, buried in ancient texts like Back to the Future II, and an episode of The Simp­sons from 2000. Then there’s Mike Judge’s now ten-year-old satire Idioc­ra­cy. While not specif­i­cal­ly mod­eled after a Trump pres­i­den­cy, its depic­tion of the coun­try as a vio­lent, back­ward dystopia, armed and cor­po­rate-brand­ed to the teeth, sure does resem­ble the kind of place many imag­ine Trump and his sup­port­ers might build. These allu­sions and direct ref­er­ences don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly pro­vide evi­dence of the writ­ers’ clair­voy­ance; after all, Trump has threat­ened us with his can­di­da­cy since 1988, with most­ly unse­ri­ous state­ments. But they do show us that we’ve seen this ver­sion of the future com­ing for the last thir­ty years or so.

One pre­dic­tion you may have missed, how­ev­er, offers us a much more sober take on the rise of a fright­en­ing neo-fas­cist dur­ing a time of fear and civ­il unrest. As Twit­ter user @oligopistos point­ed out, in the sec­ond book of her Earth­seed series, The Para­ble of the Tal­ents (1998), Hugo and Neb­u­la-award win­ning sci­ence fic­tion writer Octavia But­ler gave us Sen­a­tor Andrew Steele Jar­ret, a vio­lent auto­crat in the year 2032 whose “sup­port­ers have been known… to form mobs.” Jarret’s polit­i­cal oppo­nent, Vice Pres­i­dent Edward Jay Smith, “calls him a dem­a­gogue, a rab­ble-rouser, and a hyp­ocrite,” and—most presciently—Jarret ral­lies his crowds with the call to “make Amer­i­ca great again.”

butler tweet
Though Trump has trade­marked it, the slo­gan did not orig­i­nate with him, nor even with Butler’s Jar­ret character—the 1980 Rea­gan-Bush cam­paign used it, as Matt Taib­bi point­ed out Rolling Stone last year. (His­to­ri­ans have even shown that anoth­er of Trump’s slo­gans, “Amer­i­ca First,” was used by Charles Lind­bergh and “Nazi-friend­ly Amer­i­cans in the 1930s.”) Again, pro­to-Trump­ism has been in the zeit­geist for a long time. While But­ler may have used “Make Amer­i­can Great Again” from her mem­o­ry of Rea­gan’s first cam­paign, the way her char­ac­ter employs it speaks to our moment for a num­ber of rea­sons.

It’s true that Sen­a­tor Jar­ret dif­fers from Trump in some sig­nif­i­cant ways: “Jarret’s beef is with Cana­da instead of Mex­i­co,” writes Fusion, and “instead of busi­ness acu­men as his main cre­den­tial, reli­gion is Jarret’s stump. He’s the head of a group called Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca, which is intol­er­ant of oth­er reli­gious views, and whose sup­port­ers burn ‘witches’—meaning Mus­lims, Jews, Hin­dus and Buddhists—at the stake.” Our cur­rent can­di­date may have co-opt­ed the reli­gious right, but he doesn’t speak their lan­guage at all. Nonethe­less, he has made promis­es that give sec­u­lar­ists and non-Chris­tians chills, and reli­gious intol­er­ance has formed the back­bone of his cam­paign and of the rhetoric that has dri­ven his par­ty to the far right.

Jar­ret and the fanati­cism he inspires become cen­tral the nov­el­’s sto­ry, but the cru­cial back­ground in Butler’s 1998 depic­tion of a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic 2032 are the con­di­tions she iden­ti­fies as giv­ing rise to the Sen­a­tor’s rule (and which she described in the first book, Para­ble of the Sow­er). In Tal­ents, the narrator’s father Tay­lor Franklin Bankole writes,

I have read that the peri­od of upheaval that jour­nal­ists have begun to refer to as “the Apoc­a­lypse” or more com­mon­ly, more bit­ter­ly, “the Pox” last­ed from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos…. I have also read that the Pox was caused by acci­den­tal­ly coin­cid­ing cli­mat­ic, eco­nom­ic, and soci­o­log­i­cal crises. It would be more hon­est to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvi­ous prob­lems in those areas. We caused the prob­lems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.

In Butler’s fic­tion, the rise of Sen­a­tor Jar­ret and his mobs is an out­come of the same kinds of impend­ing crises we face now, and that far too many of our lead­ers duti­ful­ly ignore as they stage increas­ing­ly acri­mo­nious and bizarre forms of polit­i­cal the­ater. Butler’s indi­rect warn­ing to us in Para­ble of the Tal­ents may be less about the dem­a­gog­ic leader and his cult—though they pose the most dire exis­ten­tial threat in the book—than about the caus­es and con­di­tions that cre­at­ed “the Pox,” the kind of social col­lapse that Kurt Von­negut warned of ten years before But­ler in his time-cap­sule let­ter to the peo­ple of 2088, vague­ly iden­ti­fy­ing sim­i­lar kinds of “cli­mat­ic, eco­nom­ic, and soci­o­log­i­cal” crises to come. Would that we could aban­don emp­ty spec­ta­cle and heed these Cas­san­dras of the near future.

via The Huff­in­g­ton Post

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1988, Kurt Von­negut Writes a Let­ter to Peo­ple Liv­ing in 2088, Giv­ing 7 Pieces of Advice

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Brexit 101: The UK’s Stunning Vote Explained in 4 Minutes

in Current Affairs, Politics | June 23rd, 2016

The Brex­it votes have been count­ed. The Brits have decid­ed to leave the Euro­pean Union. And the finan­cial mar­kets are tak­ing it hard. Right now, futures on the Lon­don stock exchange are down 8%. The pound is down 9.8 per­cent, more than dou­ble its pre­vi­ous record decline of 4.1 per­cent. We’re liv­ing in inter­est­ing times.

No doubt, some of you are sud­den­ly won­der­ing, what exact­ly is Brex­it? And what’s at stake? Up top, you can watch a four-minute primer cre­at­ed by The Wall Street Jour­nal. Bloomberg has its own two-minute ver­sion here (or view below). The Toron­to Star breaks down Brex­it in 13 points. And The Guardian went so far as to cre­ate a guide just for Amer­i­cans. (For any­one who wants to dis­sect the pro­pa­gan­da for leav­ing Brex­it, you can watch the fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary film, Brex­it: The Movie, released last month.) Please feel free to add oth­er primers in the com­ments below.

For Amer­i­cans read­ing this, I’d point out that Brex­it and Trump share some impor­tant things in com­mon: they’re both about putting up walls, plac­ing blame on immi­grants and minori­ties; exploit­ing the resent­ments of the eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged; dis­miss­ing experts and estab­lish­ment fig­ures; and risk­ing upend­ing a frag­ile world order. How Eng­land looks on June 24th is per­haps a small pre­view of how Amer­i­ca might look on Novem­ber 9th. Only there will be tril­lions more at stake.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast