#379 – Dick Bernard: Memorial Day 2011. Confusing Times

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Today I will probably attend a Memorial Day observance sponsored by Veterans for Peace near the Minnesota State Capitol; I’ll wear the Buddy Poppy purchased at Hibbing from a VFW member on May 13, and a Forget-me-not purchased from a Disabled American Veteran here in Woodbury a couple of days ago.
Yesterday I drove over to a Minneapolis Church and put up a display for and answered questions about World Citizen and A Million Copies. The founder of World Citizen, Lynn Elling, still living, was a Navy officer in WWII and again in Korea who witnessed the horrific aftermath of Tarawa Beach and has since devoted his life to seeking enduring peace. He is the subject of A Million Copies, along with Dr. Joe Schwartzberg, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Joe is a military veteran in the Korean War era.
The ‘center piece’ for that display at the south Minneapolis Church was this photograph of Dad’s brother, my Uncle Frank Bernard, in happier times in Hololulu, before he probably woke up just in time to die on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. He is one of a boat-load of members of my own family circles who served this country in the military, including myself.
Some did not return alive.

Frank Bernard of the USS Arizona at Honolulu HI sometime before December 7, 1941


So it goes.
Memorial Day is a day of mixed messages. We honor the fallen, true, but only our own.
In too many ways we seem to still revere War as a solution, when it never has been a solution: one War only begets the next, and worse, War…. Their deaths justify more deaths….
I offer two other websites this day – places to reflect on this business of Memorial Day.
The first is this from the Washington Post, a site with photos of our soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I did a rough count at this site, and it appears that in the year since the last Memorial Day, 132 in U.S. service have died in Iraq; 494 in Afghanistan. There have been 6,013 U.S. military deaths in all, just since 2001. Compared with WWII and Korea and Vietnam, the casualty numbers are small, which makes it easier to diminish our ‘cost of war’.
The deaths are tangible reminders of an endless debate over the need for or wisdom of War. This will be played out millions of times today, whenever somebody has a thought, or reads a paper or listens to radio or watches TV.
I looked at another long-standing website that has labored mightily to keep accurate records of the carnage in Iraq during the past decade: conservatively, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead from war – this in a country roughly the size and population of California. War is not one-sided, with only soldiers as victims. It is mostly innocent civilians who die.
The cost of war is far more than just our own cost in lives on the battlefield and, now, over a trillion dollars in national treasure just for Iraq. One of the last e-mails of the day, yesterday, was from a friend who had just attended a funeral of her friends husband “…62, mental illness, cancer, Agent Orange. His Purple Heart was there and other medals. His son [both are Marine vets] told me the Veterans Administration wouldn’t listen to his Dad. Do you know where [the son] could get some help?” Was that man a casualty of war too? There are lots of ‘walking wounded’.
I will follow up on the request. I’ll see what I can do.
We are a nation in love with War: if you’ve been to Washington D.C., or any State Capitol, see the monuments.
Can we act for Peace?
I’d invite you to visit the website for a group of which I am proudly a member, the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation.
Consider joining.

#375 – Dick Bernard: Dooms Day 2011: Remembering a trip to Israel, January, 1996

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It is appropriate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the United States on the very day that Harold Camping has determined is Judgment Day: May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. (As I write at 8 a.m. CDT, it is already 6 p.m. in Kabul, Afghanistan, and later still in Japan and Australia, and there have been no bulletins as yet, so perhaps Camping’s calculations were again off, as they were the last time he made his definitive prediction, but no matter…as I learned the End Times business in Catholic school, nobody knows the day or the hour or anything else for that matter. Sometimes mere mortals manage to attract and capture attention before returning to well-deserved obscurity. But people panic anyway.)
I’ve long considered New Jersey sized Israel to be the U.S.’s 51st state, albeit unofficial, and I’ve long considered the little country to have something of a death wish. With those biases up front, here are some memories from a January, 1996, trip to that tinderbox, particularly for those who’ve never been able to go there (it is worth the trip, by the way.)
First, three ‘background’ pieces:
1. Here is a geopolitical ‘picture’ of the place, from a postcard somebody distributed two or three years ago (click on photo to enlarge):

2. Here’s a recent and fascinating geopolitical history of the Middle East that takes perhaps two minutes to view.
3. Roger Cohen of the New York Times had an interesting column about the general history May 21. It is here.
In January, 1996, I was able to join a Christian group which spent a very meaningful week or more in Israel. One of our leaders had an apparent connection to the conservative Zionist ‘side’ – something I didn’t realize till much later, particularly when I reread the tour book we each were given. This sanction gave us a perspective and access probably not as readily available to other groups.
It was a powerful trip.
This was a time of relative peace in Israel:
There was no wall separating Palestinian Bethlehem from Israel; in Manger Square fluttered a two story banner with an image of Yasir Arafat, a candidate for President of Palestine.
I spent too much money (my opinion) buying a Christian manger set from Palestinian merchant in Jerusalem: I still have the figures carved from Olive wood, and we still display it at Christmas time.
We were able to visit the Moslem Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount. No shoes allowed….
Earlier we had visited Armageddon, actually Megiddo, which overlooks the Plain of Armageddon, which is where the end times are supposed to materialize; later we visited the south end of the Dead Sea, the fabled place of Sodom and Gomorrah. (There’s a hotel there now, fronting on the smelly sea. I suppose someone could actually drown in the Dead Sea, but they’d have to work at it.)
Even though it was a time of relative peace, belligerence was not far below the surface. We visited the fresh grave of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by a right-wing Israeli barely two months before we arrived, on November 4, 1995.
At the purported site on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appointed Peter to lead the new Christian Church, our leader was reading the relevant Gospel text, when his words were drowned out by two Israeli warplanes screaming low and overhead, coming from the southeast across Galilee, heading to some unknown place. When we visited the River Jordan, of John the Baptist fame, security was tighter than usual as U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was apparently meeting some leader at a nearby location.
And so it went, at a peaceful time in Israel, an epicenter of three major world religions, January, 1996.
So, on today’s “judgement day”, the odds do not mitigate for a peaceful end for us, and particularly for Israel, and it will be humans refusing to deal with each other who will do ourselves in, if we can’t learn to cooperatively live together.

#373 – Dick Bernard: What to believe?

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A friend of mine just returned from a trip to Washington DC. He and his wife had last been there in 1978. There was much new to see. They enjoyed the trip.
He mentioned that their tour group visited the World War II Memorial (completed 2004).
A younger member of the tour group, a college student, apparently told the group that President George Bush was responsible for building this monument. It’s one of those things common in conversation: a factoid comes from somewhere, is passed along, and soon casually becomes fact. We don’t have the time or the interest to fact-check everything, much less provide reasonable context.
We chatted a little about the topic, and later in the afternoon I decided to satisfy my own curiosity about the issue. The easily found answer is here. Succinctly, the authorization for the Monument was passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President in early 1993. It takes years to plan such a major project and it happened to begin construction early in the administration of a Republican President.
Forty-eight years, including 28 with five Republican Presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush) passed by without authorizing such a Memorial.
Such facts likely wouldn’t much matter to the student on the tour. The WW II Memorial is George Bush’s accomplishment. And to some degree it is, albeit initiated and made possible by other parties and other presidents and endless numbers of other people.
Such is how political discourse goes in this country: fragments pass for truth.
It happened that my friend was in DC during the week of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. We haven’t talked about that, and since they were on vacation, and he normally is not much into politics, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to the barrage of information and misinformation that flowed during the week. Each constituency, of course, who appears on television or in other media, has a particular and carefully prepared ‘spin’ on what the event meant or means. I haven’t changed my interpretation since I wrote my commentary the day after bin Laden was killed.
The assorted bunches are all busy making virtual ‘billboards’ of their own particular bias: it was torture that got bin Laden; President Obama is a war President; on and on and on. Each takes some fragment of truth as they see it, and busily construct it into their form of whole cloth. If you follow only the iterations of one theory you can easily be convinced, as the college kid at the World War II Memorial quite obviously was, that there is only a single reasonable way of looking at the issue: George Bush built the monument to World War II.
I see no accumulation of evidence that President Obama in any way reveres war, or sees war as the answer to human problems.

We are, unfortunately, a society that does almost revere war – try to find any peace monument in Washington, DC. I’ve been there many times. On the other hand, you can hardly walk a block there without running into some monument to War. They are as ubiquitous as churches in Rome.
We have a national attitude problem about the virtues of war. Paradoxically, as we become ever more sophisticated and dangerous in the business of weaponry, we are ever more vulnerable, and losing capacity for long term success. When one fights war from cave-to-cave, or villa-to-villa, as we did finding bin Laden, all of weaponry’s magic is lost. There are too many villas and caves to cover.

Inevitably, there will come a time when our warriors will be back on horseback, or on foot, defending our village from those in neighboring villages. It is not a joy to contemplate this future for my descendants.
Consider becoming a Founding Member of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation – I have been since 2006 – and helped build towards something positive.
Bring an image of peace to the United States Capitol, as well as to your own community.

#368 – Dick Bernard: Reprising National Teacher Day Commentary May 3, 2011

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Between the May 3 post on National Teacher Day and May 7 came the latest issue of Newsweek which included a non-affirming message for wealthy folks seeking to impose change on public schools. Their experiment seems to have been less than a noble success, but don’t expect this to be widely reported.
I am one of the legion of lonely bloggers who toil in the vague shadows of major media. We tend to be belittled and dismissed. As the number on this post indicates, I am no longer an amateur; I just don’t have name recognition.
But when my post on Teacher Day went into circulation I got some most interesting responses, including one from Mary Ellen Weller in Madison WI which deserves its own space and attention on this blog. You can find it here. She seeks dialog, and I hope she receives some responses to her thoughtful writing.
My post got the usual array of responses, from “bravo” to (paraphrased) “the sooner unions disappear from the face of the earth, the better off we’ll be”. The kudos outnumbered the brickbats.
But there were three comments from separate individuals who had no idea of each others existence who more or less in the same language said the same thing, and that got me to thinking.
The three were all women, two from Minnesota, one from Oregon. The two Minnesotans were retired after long careers in education. The third did not relate her background.
Each of the three specifically commented on what their mothers, all three career teachers, had told them somewhere along the line of growing up.
The general thread was this (paraphrased): “it’s very hard work, don’t expect anything other than the satisfaction of doing good for your students”. One said she didn’t think her mother would favor unions, but she wasn’t sure how she’d respond were she around to see what was happening in Wisconsin at this time in history.
I’m Catholic and went my first six years to Catholic Schools, taught by Nuns, and frankly the comments reminded me of the Nuns extraordinarily difficult mission: to work very hard, with no rights, and many expectations. (I have good memories of my education, both in Catholic and Public School. The Catholic Church is not exactly overrun with Nuns these days…the remaining orders of Nuns know the value of their mission, be it colleges or hospitals or whatever. The individual Nuns retain the vows of poverty, etc., but many orders are not poor.)
Thinking about those three Moms: were they in today’s environment, would they not be inclined to protest. Would they accept their lot in life as a public servant? I don’t know.
My own teaching career began back in those good old days before teachers got rights and contracts and all the rest. It was indeed a powerless time.
For me the times changed in the late 1960s when teacher anger coalesced and boiled over and some degree of parity began to be demanded. This was a hugely troubling time for most lawmakers, school board members and school administrators who were accustomed to having their own way, and now had to, at minimum, be somewhat accountable for their own actions, and recognize something called teacher rights.
I began on union staff in March, 1972, which coincided, exactly, with the beginning of the bargaining of the first teacher contract under Minnesota’s Public Employment Labor Relations Act (PELRA). Those were heady and difficult times when both sides made ample and sometimes serious mistakes as they learned new relationships and new roles.
It occurs to me that when that first contract was negotiated, only a tiny number of today’s teachers had even begun their teaching career, and large numbers who started their careers after 1972 have already retired.
Many, perhaps most, of today’s teachers don’t realize what those three female teachers endured in the days before rights.
I wonder how today’s teachers will respond to the current attacks.
It is a serious question.

#367 – Dick Bernard: "I Am", the documentary

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May 4, largely on the recommendation of our friend, Annelee, we went to the documentary, “I Am”, at the Lagoon Theatre in Minneapolis.
Wherever you are, I would highly recommend you see this extraordinary and thought provoking film.
Then seriously consider the implications of what you just saw.
The official website is here.
Doubtless, there are other on-line commentaries.
For me, it was one of the most powerful commentaries on the titanic clash of contemporary western culture versus the natural order of things that I have ever seen.
The film boils down, in my opinion, to a conversation about “competition” versus “cooperation”. Of course, our contemporary world is ruled by competitors, who won’t like this message (and who control the media message we daily consume). But the outcome for their descendants is inevitable…competition is a fatal disease.
In the long run, competition doesn’t have a chance and thus we who play by competitions rules don’t either.
But, see the film for yourself, come to your own conclusions, and hopefully let others know about it.
Because it is an ‘art film’ release, it is guaranteed a low audience, initially.
My recommendation: everyone should see it.
SUPPLEMENT: 100 Years
Not from the film, but (in my opinion) directly related.
For a time last fall I watched a most interesting TV ad. The actors were a Mom and her little girl. The little girl was trying to blow out a hundred candles on a birthday cake. The message was that it was really, really hard to blow out a hundred candles, and that we had at least 100 years left of Natural Gas in this country, so not to worry.
The ad didn’t play very long…I’m guessing there were people who saw it as I did.
Recently, the exact same text has surfaced, from the same company, on the same topic. The only difference is that there is a single actor, a nice/Dad-like/young middle-age Engineer Type man conveying the exact same message: we have at least 100 years of Natural Gas left, and isn’t that reassuring?
In the recorded history of humankind, 100 years is but a tiny fraction of a second in time; far, far, far less if one considers the time it took to create this natural resource now all but depleted.
But the message is everything: not to worry.
When the gas is gone there’ll be something else…or so we hope.

#365 – Dick Bernard: A Troubling National Teacher Day, May 3, 2011

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Since May 3, 1985, National Teacher Day in the United States has been observed on the first Tuesday in May. About 1944 an Arkansas teacher first had the idea of a National Teacher Day, and in 1953 the first such day was observed.
May 3, 1985, I was Minnesota Education Association field staff (some would say “teacher union rep”, which I was), on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Home base was Hibbing; my area was from Ely to Deer River and beyond. I don’t recall the specifics of that Teacher Day, except that it was a time of pride to be a public school teacher. I would work for teachers for the next 14 National Teachers Days. They were always good days….
While international events may have scuttled my (and other) submissions on the value of teachers this date, here’s what I sent to the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday:
“Today [May 3) is National Teacher Day in the United States; and this week is Teacher Appreciation Week.
Take the time today or this week to thank a teacher, or two, or more.
First on my own list are my parents who were public school teachers for a total of 71 years between 1929 and 1971. I was a student in their public school classrooms from 8th grade through high school graduation. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
But my parents were only two among many teachers, remembered and not, who made a huge difference in my life, in small and large ways over many years.
To college Prof. George Kennedy, who finally had it with me when I was being lazy and not doing my best in my college Geography major, thank you for getting angry at me. I remember….
To Mr. H, who was, yes, somewhat odd, but was always there and did his best with we “scholars” in high school: thank you. He taught me a great deal about accepting differences, just by being different, himself.
The list could go on and on.
These are harsh days for our teachers.
Today, more than ever, thank them.”
As noted above, this May 3 is not a very kind and gentle time for America’s teachers (which includes school administrators), and particularly for their and other public unions. One hardly needs a PhD to see the success of a campaign to demonize a great profession and the unions which represent public workers. The architects of the movement to enshrine as symbols of “teaching” the always-anonymous persons called “bad” or “ineffective”, and their unions, have been successful, probably beyond their wildest dreams. This campaign to denigrate began years ago.
There are big long term dangers to labeling groups based on actions of the few, but in the short term negative labeling does work….
The amateur “experts” are legion: from the guy I’d never seen before, who recently and loudly declared that teaching was too lowly an occupation to need a license (he noticed the headline of an editorial I was reading); to a freshman legislator wringing her hands in a public meeting about the problem of “bad” teachers – a topic about which she quite obviously knew nothing, beyond the script she was holding while reading.
Then there’s a good and respected friend who spends much of his time in the company of ‘movers and shakers’ of this major city and has apparently come to think, sincerely, that things like unions, seniority, salary schedules, contracts and due process protections are destroying good education by protecting “bad” teachers who should be replaced by fresh young faces unblemished by union things.
I’ve about heard it all.
(The amateur experts take their cue, of course, from the ‘movers and shakers’ who by and large control information. As stated so well by Connecticut Superintendent Gary Chesley in an Education Week commentary accessible below, there is “a national search for a scapegoat…teachers and the tenure laws present a fertile target for bombast and demagoguery.”)
There are, of course, big gaps in the information provided, like the specific names and circumstances of these supposedly “bad” and “ineffective” people who supposedly represent teaching. Revealing the names is apparently a risk (and responsibility) no one wishes to take. But that’s not relevant. If you can make an anonymous and supposedly defective teacher the symbol of an entire profession, why not? Indeed, creating a caricature – a cartoon – is even better than a fact.
There are other conjured issues: a friend who trusts me asked about teacher pensions, pretty obviously resenting the fact that teachers even receive pensions. Luckily I had an informed answer (which I don’t think he liked): Pensions Public001
But, this is National Teacher Day: If one can get past the negative, there is a huge amount of good out there, not hard to find. I saw it Thursday night at my Kindergarten granddaughters spring music concert for family and friends (click on photo to enlarge).

Kindergarten program at Lincoln Center elementary So. St. Paul MN April 28, 2011


I saw it Sunday morning at Church when a wonderful A Cappella high school choir (directed by a teacher) from a northern Minnesota city performed for us after services.
There was an excellent column in Sunday’s New York Times.
There is infinite room for true dialogue IF people are at all interested. There are ideas out there just begging for conversation. But dialogue and ideas require openness to other points of view; the possibility of other conclusions.
But the overall official mantra I feel this National Teacher Day 2011 is distinctly vicious and negative.
It’s time for teachers and administrators to buck up and go to work where they live, delivering an alternative (and more honest) message about teachers and teaching and public schools.

Mom, then Esther Busch and in first grade, front left, in 1915 at Henrietta School, rural Berlin ND. She and her sister Lucina, front row right, both became career public school teachers. Their teacher is Miss Gates.


Dad, Henry Bernard, with his first class at Allandale School near Grand Forks ND, 1929.


Teacher Mary Garvey with her 30 students in rural St. Paul MN ca 1939

#363 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of "Circles"

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Back in the 1990s I participated in a workshop in which one of the activities was to identify the “circles” of which I was a part.
It was surprising to learn how many circles, and thus associations, I really had. These circles would include groups like “family”, “church”, “work”, “political party” and on and on and on.
As part of the exercise we identified individuals we knew in each of these circles. Potentially there were a lot of people.
I drew a rough graphic of the circle exercise:

In more recent times I’ve had occasion to revisit this business of “circles”, and it is distressing what I seem to see.
Even in the relatively short time period since the 1990s I have noted an occurrence which is, ultimately, very dangerous to our very survival as a society.
As our world has become more complex, and our country more politically polarized, I am finding that people of all persuasions are retreating into ever smaller and more limited and thus mal- or mis-informed “circles”. I’d call the phenomenon the “I can’t deal with it” response, “it” being some other point of view. People retreat into their belief or absolute interpretations of what they consider ‘truth’, often with little or no evidence to support their position.
They figuratively fight to the death to make sure that their point of view ‘wins’, whether it makes sense or not.
A society such as I describe has relatively little chance of enduring short or long term.
Examples abound.
As I write I think back to the terrifying times of Y2K in the later months of 1999.
There was almost hysteria, then, about the probability that computer clocks would end at midnight on December 31, 1999, and our world would descend into chaos. Even then, computers were omnipresent, though nowhere near what we experience in today’s world.
Of course chaos didn’t ensue when midnight first struck late at night somewhere in the Pacific January 1, 2000. By then lots of people made lots of money fixing those computer clocks; I doubt that anybody really knows whether there would have been chaos without the fix, but that is how hysteria works….
I remember particularly two vignettes from that time period – vignettes that I think are instructive in the present day.
A short distance to the east of where I write, in a Wisconsin border town, a story was published about a survivalist couple who lived in a regular house in the town and were preparing for dooms day: generators, bottled water, you name it. They were ready for the literal millenium they were certain was coming.
I thought to myself, then, what if their worst case scenario actually happened? How safe would their stash be, regardless of how ‘armed and dangerous’ they made themselves. They were simply a tiny little island in a mass of humanity. A hugely vulnerable ‘circle’ unto themselves. They would have been overrun by the local rabble.
On December 31, 1999, I recall a friend of mine telling about her flight (literal, in an airplane) from here to California to beat Y2K. It didn’t dawn on her till somewhere over the western U.S. that midnight happens at different times in different places around the globe. To what time zone was her planes computer clock set…?
She landed safely.
There are those, now, who think that they have control and can manipulate the future because of their particular means of domination.
They should not rest easy.
Neither should we, particularly if we can survive by ourselves, or with our hand-picked tiny ‘circle’.
We live together, or we collapse.

#362 – Dick Bernard: The Challenge of Change, and "Spin"

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Back in the 1970s, when overhead projectors were the way of conveying information, and handouts were the takeaway record from attending a meeting, I once attended a meeting where the below handout left, and stuck, with me. (Click on it to enlarge.)

The premise of the handout is very simple and timeless: change is not only inevitable for everyone, but is desirable, and often essential. It doesn’t take much thought to identify someone – maybe ourself – whose ‘bad habit’ may have all but killed them.
BUT, even if one knows that a certain change can be demonstrated to have long term positive benefits, there is a huge challenge to actually changing the behavior (see the chart). Adjusting to the change, whatever it might happen to be, is extremely hard work until the new behavior has become a new habit.
While change is terribly difficult for individuals; it is far more difficult for organizations of any kind. Change can be imposed by law, threat or whatever, but lack of buy-in is a real problem. A surly undercurrent of attitudes held by people who weren’t sold on the great idea can sabotage change.
It’s even worse when competing ideologies demand change, as is true in our country today. Change is what the other side must do, since we know what is right.
So, politically these days we have constant talk about the need for deep change in how our American society does business. It comes from left, right, center about most everything…. But precious few are talking with each other. More prevalent is talking AT each other. The objective is to win the war of ideas. The win is always temporary. The war is continual.
Almost always this conversation is premised on the need for the OTHER person or group to change. The initiator gives him (or her, or their) self a pass: “if you accept my superior idea or wisdom, and change by conforming to my views, all will be good. But I don’t need to change my own attitudes or beliefs.”
It just doesn’t work out quite that simply. Societal change is a team sport.
An immense contemporary impediment to positive change is “Spin”.
“Spin”, the increasingly black art of buttressing one’s argument, while simultaneously dismissing an opposing point of view, essentially sabotages change initiatives. These can be perceived as positive or negative changes (depending on one’s point of view).
Spin has always been a part of the political conversation, but until fairly recent history, a receiver of information would have at least some assurance that “facts”, while skewed, did indeed exist, and could even be found, to support or refute an argument.
Today, almost anyone on any side of any issue can successfully avoid personal accountability by choice of information, image, expert…. It takes very hard work to find some semblance of “truth” in any political positioning statement. Even ‘truth’ becomes suspect. Most recently, The President’s release of his full birth certificate does not quiet the birthers. For assorted reasons, they deny reality to keep the issues alive.
I don’t think it is possible to find a well known pundit or personality who is ‘objective’. Their bias is embedded somewhere in their writing or script. If we share their bias, we like their thinking; if we don’t, we reject it.
We pick and choose who we wish to believe. “They’re all liars”, I’ve heard a good friend say, then she selects the liar she wants to believe – the one which confirms her bias.
If you’ve read this so far, you’re already thinking of the people you don’t like who are the real culprits in this deadly game.
Best we think of ourselves, and how we’re complicit as well.

#357 – Dick Bernard: Lurching towards catastrophe

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My opinion: some kind of agreement will be cobbled together to avoid a partial government shutdown tomorrow. That won’t solve the problem, only delay what seems inevitable: the gradual but inexorable slide of the U.S. to at minimum mediocrity. As a society we are “doing stupid”, as a Forrest Gump might say. You don’t translate coffee klatch conversations among people of like minds into good policy for a complex country. But that seems to be what we’re about.
Actually the game plan of the radicals who pretend to be Republicans is very, very simple. It plays out over and over and over again.
1. Refuse to compromise, and when you do compromise, deny that you compromised at all.
2. Substitute belief for reason, and wrap your belief in the label “truth”. Scoff at Science. (My favorite in this regard comes from my own Catholic Church which has devised something that they call “objective truth” which is truth so purified that there can be no legitimate alternative realities. “We have said it; thus it is so”. Of course, it is only the Church’s opinion about the “truth”, but nonetheless it is portrayed as the genuine, real truth.)
3. If something goes right, take credit for it, even if you had nothing to do with it; if it goes wrong, blame the opposition.
4. Demonize the opposition; canonize your heroes….
5. Never, never, never get off message.
And on and on and on. When it comes to propaganda, one only needs your own core principles and the gall to attempt to impose them ruthlessly. I have such a tip sheet, used against myself and my organization almost 40 years ago. It is a single typewritten sheet, one side, double space. You don’t need 300 pages of explanation to lie. You just need the gall.
Just today came two items, separately, which seem to fit this conversation. An e-mail came from a retired friend who lives in Madison WI and has been involved in the protests there. I knew she lived there, but not that she’d been involved in the demonstrations.
An hour or two earlier, in today’s U.S. mail, came five pages from William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” captioned “THE SERFDOM OF LABOR”. (See it here: Shirer 3rd Reich001 ) The person who sent this to me is a retired teacher who grew up in Nazi Germany (born 1926), lived through the war in Germany, and came to the U.S. in 1947. She says this section of Shirer’s book perfectly describes what happened in the pre-War Nazi Germany she lived in, and she sees the same happening here with the assorted moves to kill union influence through assorted means.
Of course, the “rule”, now, is to never ever compare what is happening here to what happened in Nazi Germany. Take it from our German friend. Take what is happening here very, very seriously. It can indeed happen here. It is only a slight modification of the modus operandi that kept the Nazis in power till their country was destroyed.
There is a famous descriptor of we rubes which goes: “There is a sucker born every minute“. Too often, in this media age, this is true. We are so easily manipulated in working against our own interests.
We are in control of our own destiny only if we do the requisite hard workl.
And where we start is to begin to question the politicians who we freely elect, particularly those who represent us in Congress and State Legislatures – they are the ones closest to us.

#356 – Dick Bernard: Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota

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Two sold-out performances of Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota, attested to the interest in Dance Revels Moving History’s interpretation of the life and times of legendary Pierre Bottineau.
The program was performed at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Friday and Saturday evening, April 1 and 2. The production was a creation of Jane Peck of Dance Revels. Jane is a long-time student of historical dance forms. The program proudly noted that the activity was “funded, in part, by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008” (This is the Clean Water and Legacy amendment approved by Minnesota voters November 4, 2008.)
Pierre Bottineau (played by Dr. Virgil Benoit) was a legendary early founder of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and he was renowned guide in the white settlement of the upper midwest. Bottineau, Metis (Michif) born in the area of present day Grand Forks ND, was gifted in languages and a larger than life presence. He was one of eight pioneers who built the original log cabin St. Paul Catholic Church (the first Cathedral of St. Paul MN); he owned land and built the second frame house in what was then St. Anthony, later to become Minneapolis; he founded Osseo and later Red Lake Falls MN.
Jane Peck’s program was an extraordinarily rich demonstration of period fiddling, music and dance.
The program interspersed spoken word, ethnic music and dance, covering the period from Bottineau’s birth in 1817 through 1870. At the conclusion of the program the cast of 14 invited the audience to join them in a Red River Jig, and then engaged in discussion with the audience. (Click on the photo to see an enlarged version.)

Audience and Cast participate in Red River Jig April 2, 2011


The program specifically intended to showcase an assortment of characters, not all well known in Minnesota History. So, Sarah Steele Sibley was emphasized over her more well known husband, Henry Hastings Sibley, and Franklin Steele, builder of the first house in to-be Minneapolis. Jacob Fahlstrom, early Swedish settler via England and years with the natives in Canada, and his wife, Marguerite Bonga, whose ancestry was a freed Haitian slave well known in what is now the Duluth area, spoke powerfully to the dilemmas of cross-cultural relationships in the newly emerging Swedish community northeast of St. Paul.
Among other purposes of the Bottineau Jig Project are, according to producer Jane Peck: “1) Offering the contributions and points of view of the mixed bloods and Metis in Minnesota history. They have been ignored as much or more than the French; 2) tracing the modern-day communities of some of the cultures represented in the play, including the Metis as the only modern mixed blood community.”
An expert cast was augmented by three fiddlers, all well known interpreters of Metis and French-Canadian music: Legendary Metis Fiddler from Turtle Mountain ND, Eddie King Johnson, gave his usual great performance, as did Twin Citians Linda Breitag and Gary Schulte. Larry Yazzie and Ricky Thomas provided outstanding dance, native and Metis. Other performers, all very engaging, were M. Cochise Anderson, Josette Antomarchi, Jamie Berg, Paulino Brener, Kenna Cottman, Craig Johnson, Scott Marsalis and Jane Peck.
Jane Peck has begun and will continue a blogging project on the Bottineau Jig at her website. See her site for more stories about Bottineau Jig.
Also visit the website of IFMidwest for upcoming activities in Virgil Benoit’s French-Canadians in the Midwest organization. The annual conference of IF Midwest is planned in Fargo ND October 7-8, 2011. Details will be at the website.