3 & 27

by Dennis Green

Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is speaking about the dramatic improvement in that city’s public schools — especially in Harlem and the South Bronx. “Two numbers,” he says, “three and twenty-seven! That tells the whole story. Three percent of the public schools in the State of New York have shown improvement in the past two years. Twenty-seven percent of the schools in New York City have shown improvement.”

I’m watching MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a program hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzyinzki that I usually can’t bear viewing, as it celebrates the radical reforms underway in American education. They also issue a challenge to their mostly conservative viewers to donate money, time, supplies to that effort.

An old friend, John McDonough, gets one of those schools named after him by donating 25 computers to that school. They flash a statistic on the screen showing that 1.2 MILLION American kids drop out of school every year. Starbucks coffee stores donates a percentage of its profits to the effort.

They show footage of the schools, and the kids, most of them wearing uniforms. “Discipline,” Bloomberg explains, “is absolutely essential to the reforms. If you can’t maintain discipline in the classroom, you can’t teach.” Others, including local congressmen, describe how the parents, and not just the parents but the entire community has to get involved, take a keen interest in public schools and feel they have some influence in how they are managed.

“For the very best teachers, we have increased their salaries by 43%,” Bloomberg goes on to describe funding. “But the people of New York are willing to pay higher taxes now that they see the schools becoming accountable, and improving.”

Others explain that seniority is being replaced by outcomes as a measure of a teacher’s worth. “No longer are we allowing the old rule of ‘last hired, first fired’ to dominate the process. If teachers must be laid off in the wake of declining enrollment, the least competent go first.”

Parents in Harlem and the South Bronx and other districts are also given a choice which schools their students attend, and any opening in the best schools has so many applicants they must run a lottery, and thousands sometimes apply. Bloomberg says, “People say that there will never be good schools until we eliminate poverty, but it’s just the other way around. We will never eliminate poverty until we have good schools.”

There is no excuse in America, he adds, not to educate every young American. “When a student drops out, never gets that high school diploma, right away his chances of staying out of trouble decrease, the odds that he will start using drugs, we proved, will increase, the chances that he will wind up in prison. Bad teachers are destroying young lives!”

Many of the schools in Harlem have gone charter, but the non-charter schools have also had to get better in order to compete. In some charter schools, 100% of the students graduate, and by the third grade achieve 100% proficiency in English, history and math.

So it can be done, and it would get done, all across America, but for that to happen, recalcitrant teachers and principles, school superintendents and trustees protecting the status quo are going to have to get out of the way. For the times they are still changing!

©2010 Dennis Green

Stillness Is A Pleasure

by Dennis Green

To the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache, stillness is a pleasure. It brings about peace, lucidity, clarity in all things. Not merely silence, but stillness. Absence of chatter, of movement, of thought. An empty mind. And a fullness of heart.

No one who has never experienced this state of being can appreciate it. It is the goal of meditation, of some forms of prayer, of T’ai Chi and Qi Quong, even of the ingestion of psychedelic drugs. It isn’t the hedonistic pleasure of “feeling good” or even feeling better, but a state of mind and existence in which feeling is irrelevant. Only the visionary state matters.

This is also a lucidity beyond human ken. A “seeing” into things described by Carlos Castaneda, seeing their true reality and beyond it, to the energy and matter that underlies all existence. Even dark matter and dark energy, invisible to the ordinary eye, but making up 98% of the universe, become visible to he who sees with this non-feeling.

Sometimes, it is an intimation and imitation of death itself — complete with the blinding white light of the last moments of conscious existence and awareness — and an experience that puts the soul at peace with the real thing yet to come. Sometimes it is the heightened lucidity of hallucination, a perception of those realities usually invisible to the naked eye.

These visions may be of the gods, and they may be therefore terrifying. They may be of such ineffable beauty that forever after the voyager is enraptured by the beauty that surrounds him in every natural setting or creature. He will never see “ordinary reality” — a tree or a mountain or a dog — the same way again, untouched by the divine.

Like all spiritual raptures, stillness leaves a person as a believer in the ineffable, and convicted of a certainty that is beyond criticism, cynicism, sanity and pragmatism alike. Its truth is so apparent, so obvious, that no further argument is necessary. And at the same time, an open-mindedness to the beliefs of all others, including the great bear himself, keeps open all the doors of perception.

Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite!” I first heard that quote from professor-in-residence at UC Santa Barbara Aldous Huxley, who made it quite clear that the best cleanser for the human mind is a psychedelic drug. A few years later, and a few years after Huxley died, on acid, I took my first trip too. The stillness was almost overwhelming.

The sacred dances of the Apaches were declared “an offense to the people of the United States” and any violation of this prohibition was punishable by death. Until recently, so were their rituals involving peyote and mescaline. That’s how much the round eyes, the long hairs and the white settlers feared the magic of stillness. Europeans did their best to exterminate these “vermin,” but failed. Today, there are more Native Americans alive in this country than there were when Columbus arrived.

Geronimo was only the most famous chieftain of the Chiricahua Apache, but not the last. Down through the ages, surviving the relocation to reservations, the capture and kidnapping of children to the Christian boarding schools, and one massacre after another, the tribes have occupied Alcatraz, survived the Siege at Wounded Knee, the predations of missionaries and alcohol, and begun to regain and revive their Old Ways, the language and the stories and the culture.

Stillness is a pleasure. When I have said my piece, I will be still again. In that stillness, I am more ancient than the mountain, more powerful than the wind, and more peaceful than the sea. And no matter what you think, or say, no matter how pitiful your cries, I will have no mercy on your soul.

©2010 Dennis Green

It's Still Drug Abuse!

by Dennis Green

I take several handfuls of prescription drugs every day — from blood thinners and cholesterol lowering drugs to Vicodin for the pain from kidney stones and severe arthritis. And I’ve got it down to a fine science, how many Vicodin I can take in a 24-hour period without getting really “wiped out” and having very bad dreams. That’s three tablets, MAX.

So I wasn’t surprised when I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kevin Fagan called “Pill Parties,” about teenagers abusing prescription drugs. I sent Kevin an email praising his article, telling him a bit about my background promoting rehab programs, and invited him to examine another story that slides under the radar — prescription abuse by Senior citizens.

He shared with me a little information about how difficult his story had been, how nobody wanted to be quoted on the record about the subject. Big Pharma is in total denial about the abuse of prescription drugs, claiming that their products are “remarkably safe and rarely misused.”

So I decided to do a little research, going online, but also talking to some of my former contacts in the rehab field. I discovered that Senior prescription drug abuse is indeed a serious problem, affecting many geezers and old biddies, and has been recognized as a major public health problem since the early days of the Bush Administration in the year 2001.

In 2001, an article in USA Today reported that in a “silent epidemic,” 17% of elderly abuse or misuse prescription drugs. The category most often abused are the benzodiazepines — tranquilizers and sleeping pills — Valium, Librium, Xanax, Halcion and ProSom among the brand names. Next most commonly abused are Demerol, Vicodin, and other codeine and morphine derivatives, often prescribed after painful hip fractures.

Because most of the focus in the debate about drug abuse has been on teenagers smoking weed, or executives snorting the white stuff, or street crazies high on Ripple or meth, most Seniors addicted to alcohol or drugs are deeper in denial of their problems. Alcoholics who no longer metabolize those three cocktails as well as they used to claim they can’t be under the influence. Physicians fail to prescribe lower dosages, as they should, for elderly patients who metabolize sleeping pills more slowly too.

But as the experts have to remind them, “It’s still drug abuse!” Yes, you got that prescription for a legitimate ailment, but if you’ve been taking it for more than four months, chances are you’re now addicted. Prescription drug expenditures per senior have risen from $559 per year in 1992 to $2,810 today. The average number of prescriptions per Senior during that same time has risen from 19.6 to 38.5. Women of all ages are more likely (56%) than men (42%) to use prescription drugs.

The methamphetamine epidemic among rural residents of America is matched only by the epidemic of prescription drug abuse among Seniors. But as long as Smith-Kline Glaxo, Hoffmann-La Roche, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Merck, Bristol-Meyers, Bayer, Eli Lilly and others claim that their products are “remarkably safe and rarely abused, because of physician safeguards and druggist controls,” the problem will go unrecognized and unresolved.

©2010 Dennis Green

The Myth of Senility

by Dennis Green

It was once thought that everyone who lived long enough, past 70, would begin to suffer senility, especially forgetfulness. We know now that Alzheimer’s is a disease that not everyone has or gets, along with other forms of dementia. Young children can be tested and show signs of forgetfulness and may well carry the gene for Alzheimer’s.

So the aging brain is not as simple as we once thought. And although most of us older citizens have moments of forgetfulness, when that synapse for recalling the name of someone or something just won’t fire off, chances are that in a few more minutes it will. Patients with dementia lose whole big blocks of memory and recall which don’t come back, ever.

Scientists and care givers see an “epidemic” of Alzheimer’s because more people are living past 70 and into the years when its usual onset occurs. Early onset Alzheimer’s is still somewhat uncommon, but might begin to affect humans as young as 5-7 years of age.

The old question of course persists: Is such a disease genetic or environmental? And the evidence so far suggests that it is almost entirely genetic in origin. But we don’t yet know whether its genetic properties are even dominant or recessive, whether it can be inherited from only one parent, or must be reinforced by genetic determinates from both.

I was hoping for the recessive gene, because, while my mother, in her late 80s now, suffers from a form of non-Alzheimer’s dementia, my father was very clear headed until he died at the age of 90. But now evidence is emerging of another factor that is not genetic at all.

Researchers now believe that prolonged periods of high blood pressure, such as my mother suffered in her fifties, can cause scarring in the veins and arteries and the blood vessels that feed the brain. Later in life, this scarring can impede the flow of blood, and cause the gradual death of some brain cells farthest from the source of oxygen-rich blood supply. This damage then results in various degrees of non-Alzheimer’s dementia — what we might once have called “senility.”

Before I submitted to bypass surgery, I insisted that they do a sonogram of my carotid arteries, those big arteries running up my neck and providing blood to my brain. I had heard that blockage in arteries to the heart is often accompanied by blockage of the carotids, and I didn’t want to be saved from heart failure only to suffer a massive stroke. One carotid was blocked about 40%, not enough for concern but enough for me to want to keep my cholesterol and inflammation under control.

Because of my own health problems, and family, inherited diseases such as kidney stone formation, I take a keen interest in all these subjects. When DNA testing becomes a little more affordable, I will have it done, and by then the genes for dementia may be known, and I’ll ask to know everything. What cannot be prevented can at least be prepared for in various ways, if only to steel oneself against the inevitable, or the probable.

Senility may be a myth, but aging is certainly not!

©2010 Dennis Green

The False Guise of Civility

by Dennis Green

I’m being called a “liar” and a “Limbaugh.” I’ve gotten death threats. My integrity has been questioned, along with my experience and my intelligence. All for saying that American public schools, including Alameda’s, are failing their students badly and deserve our tax support only for being accountable in return.

What a radical concept! Of course, we criticize bankers, financial manipulators and speculators, and day traders who take fat salaries or bonuses in the wake of their companies’ failures — but if you suggest that many teachers are doing a poor job of motivating and teaching their students you can expect a shitstorm.

In the wake of ten recent examples of vandalism against Democratic offices and headquarters, death threats by phone and email to Democrats who voted for the health care reform bill, even racial and anti-gay epithets, the Republican Central Committee accused the Democrats of “trying to stifle democratic debate and freedom of speech under the false guise of civility.” The false guise of civility. There it is.

It’s come to that. Our opinions are so much more important now than civility. “I’m right and you’re wrong, and the only way you could be so wrong is because you’re so stupid! And probably a faggot at that.”

I smoked out one guy, married to a teacher, who went so far as to claim that merit pay is a hoax, that President Obama’s “Race to the Top” Program is a farce because Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has never been a classroom teacher, and besides, you can’t evaluate good teaching anyway, especially not with TEST SCORES!

The writer overlooks the fact that education is all about test scores. The only way you demonstrate achievement and competence in math, or spelling, or writing coherently, or having learned the Third Law of Thermodynamics is by taking and passing a test. It might be “true/false” or multiple choice or an essay exam, but your test scores as a student determine whether you get that passing grade, that scholarship, or admission to Cal.

So why not evaluate the teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores, how many of them drop out, how many of them achieve 100% proficiency in a given subject? You can supplement such measurements with observation of the classroom and see whether the students are motivated, engaged, excited, and learning. You can also test the teachers and determine whether they are prepared to teach, and whether they maintain their knowledge and their skills. Excellence in teaching is not some mysterious aura that can’t be measured or observed.

Under the false guise of civility, I will even give the worst teachers the benefit of the doubt. I think you are in the minority, perhaps no more than one third of all teachers holding tenure, and I think you would be much happier doing something else for a living. And you wouldn’t be destroying young lives.

©2010 Dennis Green

Compensation & Self-Worth

by Dennis Green

Listening to the “Pay Czar,” the man assigned to mediate compensation packages for banking and other top executives in companies benefiting from the Bailout, I hear a remarkable assertion. “In this society, one’s compensation, the salary and bonuses and stocks and stock options aren’t just for buying another house, or another car or another vacation. It reflects your self-worth. Someone asks me, ‘How can you give me two million less than my neighbor?’ and I have to have an answer.”

It reminds me of the comments made the other day to me by two returning Iraqi War vets, who said, “We thought we were winning that war, until we got home.”

This mediator, Kenneth Feinberg, also mediated the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund payouts, a task he says only seminary could have prepared him for, considering the stories he heard. Before that, he mediated the settlement of the Agent Orange lawsuit by Vietnam vets, a payout of $180 million, the largest tort settlement of its kind at the time.

He talks about the disparity between executive and line staff pay, and the disparity between Wall Street and Main Street, but expresses some confidence that Wall Street is finally listening to populist anger over the terms of the TARP Bailout and subsequent huge bonuses. “Even the CEO of Goldman-Sachs, which was not a part of the TARP Program, consulted with me on G-S pay structure, and his own payment terms,” Feinberg relates.

But his perspective marks an enormous cultural values shift in America. There was a time when personal virtue — being a decent person — provided the most reliable measure of self-worth. But no more. That model may have begun shifting with the Robber Barons of the late 19^th Century, oil magnates like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, and then continued with manufacturing giants like Henry Ford.

So it’s more than simple greed/avarice, but also compounded by one of the other Seven Deadly Sins, pride/hubris. “I make more money than you do, and so I must be superior.” Such an attitude, or philosophy if it deserves the term, is corrosive to the dream of equality, but also intensifies what the Republicans love to call “The Class Wars.”

Unfortunately, this conviction infects even the lower classes of working stiffs. It helps explain why auto workers would rather see their company go bust than sacrifice a few of those big perks they’ve won over the years. And it may shed some light on why so many public school teachers have become bigger slackers than any of their worst students.

If teaching was once a calling, and is no longer such…if working with your hands was once the noble fulfillment of a working class existence…if bankers learned their lessons in the 1930s…all these advancements in our understanding of self-worth and status have been lost.

What Kenneth Feinberg hears all the time from people he is attempting to provide with a little reality therapy is that what’s on the inside doesn’t count anymore, nor even what’s on the outside of a persona. Only compensation is the true measure of a man, or a woman too for that matter. And if that’s what we’ve come to, our craven materialism is even worse than I thought.

©2010 Dennis Green

AUSD Bailout

by Dennis Green

Are Alameda schools “too big to fail?” Or just too small to succeed?

If your $80 million per year business were facing a serious deficit, you’d cut expenses, trim payroll, maybe sell off some assets, eliminate a losing division or two. You wouldn’t ask the taxpayers to bail you out, to simply hand you $112 million MORE without any accountability or measurable return on their investment. Unless you were AIG…or AUSD.

Because that’s exactly what the Alameda Unified School District is doing. Although they will collect more than $80 million this year in property tax and parcel tax revenue and from other sources — $8,435 per student — that’s not enough.

Rather than justifying the money they do spend, the district officials simply complain that they don’t spend as much as some other nearby school districts do, that the State of California doesn’t spend enough, and that it’s a lack of funding that makes American public schools so inept. Or they blame the parents, and the students, or the culture. Or technology…

With nearly a third of high school students in America dropping out before graduation, and one in three schools failing the “No Child Left Behind” standards, however, our schools have more “recalls” than Toyota. GWB’s “No Child Left Behind” program hasn’t, apparently, worked, except to force faculties to “teach to the test.” President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program calls for better training, preparation, mentoring and accountability for teachers, weakening the grip of tenure and unions. But California didn’t qualify in Round One RTTT funding, largely because of opposition from the unions.

In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies, the problems of one little island off the coast of Oakland would seem almost inconsequential, but there it is. Three schools in Alameda have already gone “charter” and another — failing Chipman Middle School — is about to do the same. At least seven private schools also compete.

So what are the likely consequences if the AUSD proposed new parcel tax — more than double the current two parcel taxes combined, and extended over a period of eight years — fails? In a meeting I had with Trustee Mike McMahon, he said, “We will probably have to close one high school, one middle school and three elementary schools.” He did not name which ones.

But if you examine the holdings of AUSD, the land it owns, only one high school property contains sufficient acreage for future expansion, and that’s Encinal High, near the West End. Alameda High School is surrounded by private property, and owns only one nearby older building, seismically unsafe, currently housing central and district administrative offices.

Likewise, the smaller, under-enrolled elementary schools include Franklin, which serves students from families residing in the Gold Coast. Only in the face of a failed parcel tax initiative, and enormous deficits, would it be remotely acceptable to close Franklin Elementary, but the Superintendent may have to do just that.

Simply giving the schools more money without any greater accountability is like the infamous bank bailout of 2008. Any new funding should be tied to higher teaching standards, greater accountability and transparency.

But in 20 years, there won’t be any classrooms left as we know them. Fixing public education in America will take exceedingly radical changes, such as moving toward the Virtual Classroom, sharing the best teachers across district and state lines, and replacing textbooks with the electronic versions, probably Steve Jobs’ “iPad.” Maybe we can even replace some Superintendents…and Trustees.

©2010 Dennis Green

You'll Never Get Rich

by Dennis Green

You’re in the Army now

You’re not behind a plow.

You’ll never get rich,

You son-of-a-bitch,

You’re in the Army now!

All through my twenties, until I was almost 35, I kept asking, along with the rest of America, “Why are we in Vietnam?” For most of my life, in fact, born a little over a year before Pearl Harbor, America has been at war. With Germany and Japan, with North Korea and China, invasions of Cuba and Central American countries, the war against the people of Vietnam, in Bosnia, in the Gulf War, and now, still, after eight long years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why?

Why is half of our national budget dedicated to “Defense?” Why do people complain when we spend money on health care, or education, or broadband, but not a peep about the trillions spent on war? Are we that violent a people?

I was watching Night of the Living Dead (1968) the other day, and about halfway through the movie remembered that the undercurrent in the zombie film is the threat of all those alien, foreign, communist hordes coming to take away our freedom, to suck out the very life blood of liberty. The Cold War, in 1968, was still going strong, and the ghosts of Joe McCarthy and Loyalty Oaths still hung over the land.

All that propaganda. There were even movies that portrayed Russian soldiers occupying American cities. “The Russians are coming!” filled the airwaves, even mainstream broadcast news. Meanwhile, our primary means of fighting that Cold War was to stockpile atomic warheads, thousands of them, at a cost of trillions of dollars that couldn’t be spent on anything else.

Today, in Afghanistan and Iraq, young Americans are dying to protect poppy fields. We are committing the same rank stupidity that brought the Soviet Union down. And for what? So that Afghanis don’t come and occupy American cities? So that Islamic terrorists don’t get past all our security measures and crash more airliners into buildings?

Those Americans in uniform who are risking their honor and their lives, who will come back, many of them, damaged for life, or in body bags, are not getting rich. But somebody is. Somebody always is. If the manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction, like Boeing and McDonald Douglas — troop carriers and Humvees, RPGs and sniper rifles, gas masks and night vision goggles, drones and land mines — were not getting rich, we would not be perpetually at war.

The superficial patriot will talk about honor, and notifying the family members of their dead sons and daughters, without ever asking why. Why did more than 56,000 Americans die in Vietnam? So that the Masters of War could get rich. Why have more than 4,000 Americans died in Iraq? Mission accomplished.

So long as the American people sit on their hands, those hands will be covered in the blood of all those who died in vain.

©2010 Dennis Green

The Waste Land

by Dennis Green

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, a few years after the horrors of World War One, the “Great War,” the “War to End All Wars” had left Europe and America in a state of shock. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, takes its titled ironically from the prayer, “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”

The wasted battlefields of Alsace-Lorraine are never mentioned in the poem, but Eliot’s contemporaries would have felt it underlying every word. We witness here a tipping point of western civilization and culture, the end of Victorian innocence and the beginning of a modern cynicism which endures to this day.

Only the uneducated, the naïve, the untutored can be optimistic in these times, Eliot would argue. And yet he finds precedence in Greek and Roman mythology, religion and philosophy, in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, even in the Upanishads and Buddhist texts. “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata,” (Give, sympathize, control), he quotes the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which teaches Krishna how to rule his subjects.

He may also be alluding to his marriage and his neurotic, cheating first wife, who manipulated their marriage until he finally separated from her. She later went insane, was institutionalized and died without ever seeing him again.

In six pages of footnotes, almost as many pages as the poem itself, he has great fun with the reader, since at least half of those notes are in Latin, German, Italian, Greek or Hindi. Obscure lines are elucidated with even more obscure references. He is, in our contemporary vernacular, “goofing.” And he is tearing at the very fabric of religion, faith, belief and dogma — the last leftovers of Western Civ.

Yet he is not a nihilist, not at all. He is one of the first of a New Age of believers who find hope in more lasting and traditional sources rather than 19^th Century Victorian thought and Christian culture. In a search pre-dated by the Transcendentalists, he looks to Pagan traditions — Greek and Roman mythologies, Hindu and Buddhist texts — to find comfort in the eternal.

In later poems, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, Eliot finds modern disbelief as wanting as the hymns of old. “We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” And in “Because I know that time is always time/And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place…” he finds a dry affirmation. A sort of post-Punk Gothic Deconstructionist joy. “Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something/Upon which to rejoice.”

In our own time, Eliot has been badly misunderstood. He anticipates a collapse of all that was held dear, writing in the 1920s, without knowing it would take another hundred years for that collapse to be completed. He would live until 1965, to see a re-flowering of interest in Buddhism and the Vedic truths, but he also saw in London, and on the news, scenes of a Soho and a Bleeker Street he would not have recognized. Mods and Rockers and all those Mockers!

Although I suspect he may have agreed with the young man carbuncular, and his plaint, “Can’t get no satisfaction!”

©2010 Dennis Green

Are Alameda Schools Mismanaged?

by Dennis Green

The only questions being asked these days of the Alameda Unified School District is whether they have enough money. As if revenue and expenses, the balance sheet, is the only thing that counts in education. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

I spent many years as a department or business manager, and always knew that my primary task was the care and feeding of my employees, with moral and psychological support, not just income. It was my job to inspire them to do their very best. And that’s also the job of any classroom teacher vis-à-vis his or her students — inspiration, motivation, the conviction that they can do the work and the results will be valued when they do.

The rest is butt-kiss. Academic politics, interference, the demoralizing influence of someone who just doesn’t get it, the true dynamic of the process of learning. And ultimately, money has very little to do with it.

I’m told that young teachers leave the profession because they can’t support three or four kids, a family, on the salary, or that the lower pay discourages the very best scientists and engineers from even considering teaching to begin with. I have an easy answer to such objections. If you’re driven by the passion for learning — giving it to your students and getting it back from them — you’ll find a way. Because teaching is still a CALLING!

You’ll put the old lady to work full-time too, and let her share the task of supporting those kids you had together. Or you’ll get a part-time job after school, as many of my own teachers in Eureka did.

And if you care more about the paycheck than the experience, you don’t belong in teaching anyway. You will burn out rapidly and just sleepwalk and phone it in. You’ll need tenure and a union just to keep your job.

I don’t know whether the public schools in Alameda are well-managed, or not. But I have heard of some very questionable practices. One is the requirement that the district make up for losses to investments in the staff and faculty retirement funds.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, 3/10/10: “This week, CalPERS, the state retirement pension fund, lost $91.2 million on a Boston commercial real estate deal, after losing $600 million in other such gambles in the past 90 days, while the California State Teachers Retirement System, (CalSTRS), faces a loss of $325 million invested in a Manhattan skyscraper project.”

A complete lack of transparency on the part of management — the district Trustees, most of them, and the Superintendent herself — regarding where the money IS spent also fails the smell test.

Likewise, negotiating sweetheart contract deals with the teachers unions — reducing class size rather than laying teachers off in the face of deficits and declining enrollment, or bringing in intra-district transfer teachers at a higher pay scale than other districts — is simply bad business practice. Unfortunately, most “managers” in the public school district are administrators, i.e., former teachers, many of whom burned out on the classroom itself long ago.

They are loathe to evaluate, let alone discipline, admonish or even fire teachers who are cynical and uninspired. They regard them as more like colleagues, or even adversaries to be feared, than as staff members, employees, people they are responsible for actually managing. So, yes, I’m beginning to conclude, for these and a host of other reasons that our schools are so poorly managed it’s surprising they still function at all.

But try telling that to the nearly one-third of students who drop out before graduating from high school. Dysfunctional? Somebody is.

©2010 Dennis Green

Yeats, Pound & Eliot

by Dennis Green

Ezra Pound scholar Hugh Kenner was teaching the class. It was early 1961, and I was still single, going back and forth between two lovers — Linda Barge at UC Santa Barbara and Chris Van Fleet at UC Berkeley. Somehow, in the midst of all that sex and romantic intrigue, I managed to squeeze in a class called “Yeats, Pound & Eliot,” taught by Professor Kenner.

I was enchanted by the work of these giants of modern poetry — Yeats Irish, Eliot British-American, (born in St. Louis Missouri but took on British citizenship,) Pound born in Idaho but emigrated to Europe — encouraged in my studies by a man who had met and partied with all three of them. I became convinced that the soul of William Butler Yeats, who died a few months before I was born, had migrated into the embryo that I was.

And all three of them were part of the esoteric “London Circle” of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, who practiced the “Magick” and Gnosis of ancient cultures they had revived. All three of the poets shared certain occult experiences and incorporated them into their work — including Illuminati grail lore from The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance, as well as Buddhist and Confucian texts and the Hindu Upanishads.

Thus began an intellectual adventure that would take me into Ireland, Confucianism, The Unwobbling Pivot, A Vision, astrology, the Tarot, Runes, the I Ching, divination, and ultimately see me initiated as a member of the Illuminati Order and Io Pan! Today, I began revisiting Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, with a degree of comprehension and appreciation I’ve never been armed with before this.

“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.”

Kenner was an imposing figure in that small classroom of 20 students, chair of the English department, on his way to greatness and a position at Johns Hopkins, who had served as best man at his friend William F. Buckley, Jr.’s wedding. He spoke with a curious Eastern seaboard accent, (to California ears), sounding at times as if he had a mouthful of mush.

But I was fascinated. He told us how T.S. Eliot’s wife had run off on their wedding night with Bertrand “Bertie” Russell, how Pound had broadcast propaganda for the Italian fascists, for Mussolini, been captured by American forces, kept in a lion cage for a week beside a dusty road, and was about to be shot for treason when an outcry from patriotic American writers and artists won him a reprieve and a near lifetime sentence as an inmate at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C. (His sentence overlapping with John Hinkley’s…)

There, Kenner had spent many hours interviewing Pound, whom he had met many years earlier at a garden party in London, where, in the back yard, Kenner, Yeats, Pound & Eliot, all quite drunken, had gotten into a pissing contest, literally, seeing who could piss the highest up the garden wall. Stories like these merely confirmed my commitment to the study of literature.

Years later, I took a graduate seminar in Pound’s Cantos from Kenner, and did some important research, acquiring copies of old, out-of-print books Pound had studied at St. Elizabeth’s, including a translation of the I Ching by James Legge, and found traces of that text in the Chinese Cantos. Imagine my surprise when my article wound up verbatim in Kenner’s book The Pound Era!

But I tired of Ezra Pound, his anti-Semitism and general narrow-mindedness, and dropped out of the PhD program to pursue other interests. Had I completed my dissertation on Pound, I would have no doubt wound up being stuck teaching his poetry, and I had found his translation of the Confucian Odes, completed at St. Elizabeth’s after he learned Chinese, so awful I could not imagine such a fate.

Eventually, Pound was released, returned to his wife and mistress in Rappallo, Italy, to the villa where he had made his radio broadcasts, railing against the Americans, Usura and the Jews. And he died in Venice in 1972.

©2010 Dennis Green

NutMeg NOT for Governor

by Dennis Green

Former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, aka, “NutMeg,” is not a serious candidate for Governor of California. Trust me, I’m a volunteer for Jerry Brown. But she is a real nut-bag. Stiffed the press, didn’t even bother to register to vote, claims that being rich and running a big company qualifies her for politics. Unlike those governors who were merely actors. Like the last Republican.

And she’s also a multi-billionaire, and so can afford to buy that residence in Sacramento that Jerry once eschewed. He also drove, as I recall, a battered old two-door Plymouth, but that was back in the ‘70s, when he was tagged “Governor Moonbeam.”

In fact, I was working as an editor and lobbyist for UC when Governor Jerry Brown decided to give all state employees a flat COLA, which amounted to merely $63 apiece. I was not amused.

So when I had the opportunity to meet with him in his warehouse/loft in Oakland in 1998, as head of a delegation of business leaders from Alameda, I was uncertain what to expect. We’d heard he would be running for mayor.

“We hope,” I announced at the start of the meeting, prowling around his office as was my style, “that if you’re elected mayor of Oakland, we may enjoy a more kindly, friendly neighbor, one who will help us mediate the Oakland Airport noise ordinance!”

Jerry was not impressed. In fact, he said, “Goddammit, Green, sit down! You’re making me nervous!” I sat down, but I did not back down an inch.

By the end of that meeting, we had an accord, and I was so impressed by Jerry’s pragmatic approach to things, that I walked with him across the big open floor space and asked how I could volunteer for his campaign. He was delighted by my offer. And I found him completely grounded, down to earth.

So I worked in the big loft all that summer, writing pitches, stuffing envelopes, even answering the switchboard. I learned enough, first-hand, about Jerry’s operation and his operating style that I had more confidence in him than ever when all was said and done. And he brought 20,000 new residents into downtown Oakland during his eight years in office, changed the whole climate of Oakland, put through dozens of initiatives to strengthen law enforcement.

Some of those gains have gone all to hell under the reign of Ron Dellums, an old recycled Washington, D.C. hack brought out of retirement to prevent the Hispanics from taking power. But Jerry still resides in Oaktown, and there’s still hope.

Meg Whitman refused for weeks to meet with the press, has not voted in any elections in years, and has spent millions of dollars of her own money on her campaign. She isn’t very photogenic, or charismatic, so I can understand her reluctance to appear on camera, except in those expensive TV commercials made around her (usually still photo) image. But as an absentee politician, she comes off as a bit eccentric, if not a real nut.

Hence the nickname “NutMeg.” Can she replace Arnold the Governator? Let’s hope not. But if she does, the goodies in eSacramento will always go to the highest bidders! Business as usual.

©2010 Dennis Green