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Current Issue: Volume 27, No.7 , Week of August 6, 2006
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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 2, 2006
Latest Update: August 6, 2006
E-Mail Icon jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Topic of the Week:

A Few Good Friends, And Much More Love:
Inclusion and Exclusion in American Neighborhoods and Communities

Jeanne the Cat is still prowling. She needs to share summer thoughts with you. This has been an incredible time. One part of my life is over - the formal teaching at CSUDH. I'm supposed to enjoy settling in to what I want to do. But I find myself more tuned into the vibes of our times than I ever wanted to be, and more concerned for what I see as wrong in the directions we are taking.

I'd like to go back to the poem (not-poem) I put up in the last issue, before the heat wave that's crossing the country as we speak. I said something in that, as I dashed it out on my keyboard, with little but passion behind it. I said:

Corporate America Is Saving Israel for Armageddon justification.
That means all the Jews have to get back to Israel.

"Of course, most of them are expected to die unto eternal hell there
When they refuse to convert."

from: Proportionate Response: I Get It.

Later, I apologized to Susan at UWP for having expressed my passion so nakedly. Even though this is Naked Space, we still try to keep dialogs going, with a minimum of affect to obscure the facts and issues. By corporate America I meant Bush, for his entire allegiance and understanding is rooted in that context, the only one, perhaps, he has ever known. "Ay, there's the rub."

I didn't have a reference to cite on that, just my general reading, passim. And so I thought I shouldn't have even said it. I'm trying to teach you, not impose my perspective. But this morning in the New York Times International section that I was reading just for me, not to teach, I read:

"Others say Mr. Bush cannot help looking at Israel through the prism of his Christian faith. 'There is a religiously inspired connection to Israel in which he feels, as president, a responsibility for Israel’s survival,' said Martin S. Indyk, who was President Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and kept that post for several months under President Bush. He also suggested that Republican politics were at work, saying Mr. Bush came into office determined to 'build his Christian base.'

"But the White House press secretary, Tony Snow, dismissed that idea, telling reporters last week that Mr. Bush does not view the current conflict through a 'theological lens.' "

From Bush’s Embrace of Israel Shows Gap With Father. (Backup copy with emphasis added.)

Well, now, just a week or so later, we are beginning to find references in the public media, which is where most of us turn to keep up with current social, political, and economic issues. Tony Blair's use of the term "apocalyptic" to describe affairs in the Middle East, and the difficulty all officials are having in analyzing what's happening in the Middle East brings to mind the concerns for Armageddon and the not-necessarily-rational reference to the present in terms of armageddon and the end of times. This is a paradigm shift, in which more is seen at stake in the dominant discourse than wages, economics, and production. We have come to a point in world history in which people are increasingly demanding that there must be more than jobs and material goods; social and emotional learning are reasserting their essential role in establishing a "good life." How we go about exploring this paradigm shift, preparing ourselves and our communities to understand it and to grow in new directions will be the focus of our Fall Semester 2006.

love and peace, jeanne

References:

NEWS, Announcements, and

Current Events Discussion Topics:

  • News on Immigration, Family Unification, and Population Explosion

    Immigration runs into all the problems of parts of the family having citizenship on one side of the border, parts on the other side. No problem, except that as migration patterns swell during nation-state disputes, real people hurt. No, I'm not talking about the Mexican -U.S. border. I'm talking about Palestine-Israel. These questions are never simple. Here's a story that may help you see how complicated it all gets: Immigration, Family Unification, and Population Explosion

    Materials on the Dada Art Movement

    Dada's Women, Ahead of Their Time Another New York Show. Backup.

    I need to recheck some of these links. I thought I backed them all up, but things were pretty hectic. As soon as I can take a break from narrative writing I'll be puting up lectures on this. We'll use the concept in Moot court this Fall because the Dada movement occurred in a time very similar to our own - in which people felt a kind of despair, and artists responded with the kind of inanity they saw all around them. jeanne

    For more on understanding why and how artists engage in the process of trying to change traditional museum-bound painting, go to Dada as Arts Politically and Socially Opposed to Some of the Consequences of Our Culture and Our Preference for the Rational and The Arrogance of its Knowingness. And don't miss Paul Tractman's Dada, The Irreverent, Rowdy Revolution in the May 2006 Smithsonian Magazine Online. Backup. And now 'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum By Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, June 16, 2006.

    Why School Is Like It Is

    What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power. by S. Papert. Our topic for Moot Court in Fall 2006 will be Thinking, For All of Us, By All of Us This reading will is one from a graduate MIT course, Technologies for Creative Learning, Fall 2004, by Prof. Mitchel Resnick. I'll have more up on this shortly. jeanne

    Visual Sociology

    SquiggleA Range of Sources on Global Info

    Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor - New York Times - The National Review
    Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
    Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation - The Cato Institute (Libertarian)
    BBC NEWS | Americas     - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
    Los Angeles Times - Chicago Tribune - La Opinion - The Washington Post
    Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report
    The American Prospect

    Memorandum, Political Web - Diggs - College Network of New York Times - New York Times Learning Network

    Indymedia - Mother Jones - BBC News - New Profile - KPFK Progressive Radio
    Progressive Sociologists Network Environmental Working Group - Mirror of Justice

    Theory, Policy, Practice of a Career by jeanne and Susan.

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