This is a short diary about personal goals, and political goals, under capitalism.

A column in Counterpunch this week (Iain Boal in conversation with David Martinez) inspired me to reconsider the intellectual legacy of Garrett Hardin.  In this essay, I will consider Hardin’s short piece "The Tragedy of the Commons" as an defining phenomenon of modern ecology.  Even though the "tragedy of the commons" is real, I argue, it has more to do with the poverty of capitalist commons management than with the incapability of society to manage the commons.  Good commons management will be necessary in the future, which will at some point mean a global human society more capable of protecting the commons than what we have now.

This is a book review of Rosemary Radford Ruether's America, Amerikkka, a book by a "Professor of Feminist Theology" which offers a theological take on American history as well as a recommendation for a "liberation theology" in the American context.

The Los Angeles Times, a subsidiary newspaper of Tribune Corp., has as its lead editorial in today's Opinion section a denunciation of "Peace Studies" departments: "The Peace Racket," by Bruce Bawer.  This piece reveals many of the core assumptions of anti-peace neoconservative propaganda, so it's worth a line-by-line examination.

A general call back to popular rule, and honesty in politics, against the unreality of political discourse in this era.

Much of the criticism of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has centered upon issues of implementation and of inequity: NCLB, it is said, is poorly funded, and punishes schools it should be helping.  But what if the practices demanded of schools by NCLB are simply the wrong schooling practices?  What if the high-stakes testing regime of NCLB demands teach-to-the-test practices that constitute inappropriate schooling?  Such a critique would connect the ritual performances of school life (under NCLB) with its (inappropriate) outcomes. This connection was notably made in Peter McLaren’s classic (1986) study of Catholic schooling, Schooling as a Ritual Performance.  In this review I shall look at McLaren’s theory as explained in this book, suggesting a way in which Schooling as a Ritual Performance could be used to mount a persuasive critique of "ritual performance" in the schools under NCLB.

Given the negative orientation to the future of many of the most recent diaries here, I thought it appropriate to revisit the "culture industry" thesis, more specifically the thesis given by the essay on "the culture industry" in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.  This diary will look at how the "culture industry" has placed culture under the control of industrial power and in the discipline of mass production, and examine the argument in "The Culture Industry" for its social lessons and its relevance to the present political situation.

Theodor Adorno, who according to Jurgen Habermas was the main author of the "Culture Industry" essay.

This is a review of Charles Derber’s (2005) book Hidden Power, a progressive problem-solution book offering advice to the Democratic Party about how to conduct "regime change" in America.  Derber is uninformed in certain ways, but his advice ought to be heeded, especially as regards expanding the realm of "people power" in American politics.  Derber brings a Gramscian reading of the American political situation to his political advice, and this makes said advice stronger and more practical.

Sustainability is nowhere to be found, and so we appear to be groping in the dark when looking for it.  One of the ways in which we can proceed to build knowledge about sustainability, however, is in the community garden.  A conceptual guide to the idea of sustainability is located in the concept of prefiguration (as described by Joel Kovel in his book The Enemy of Nature), which describes the sense in which social institutions point to the possibility of a global, ecologically sustainable, society.  Community gardens have important prefigurative qualities, too.  The bulk of this diary, then, will be about one such community garden, one located on the campus of a college: the Pomona College Natural Farm.  The Pomona College Natural Farm will be presented as a place where sustainability, both in social and ecological terms, can be studied.  Its conclusion will attempt to speculate about the significance of the Farm and of community gardens as "prefigurations."

I know there are a lot of diaries on the Supreme Court's decisions today -- but one particular decision of theirs, Parents v. Seattle, deserves a very close reading, as the precedent it appears to set may affect the quality of public education our children will obtain.  What I will show in this initial reading is that today's decision is about permitting de facto segregation to continue.  Part 1 will be a close reading of the syllabus; part 2 (forthcoming) will discuss the realities of de facto segregation in the context of Parents v. Seattle.

Here's the theory, DKosers.  There is an elite consensus around the notion of "saving capitalism for a dying planet."  The idea is that if "growth" (which we desperately want and need if we are to maintain our positions as representatives of capital) is to continue, planetary concerns for the future will have to be ignored, even with reckless oil and coal consumption levels causing a runaway greenhouse effect.  That is what is behind the G8 agreement, so wonderfully diaried by Devilstower.

(Crossposted at European Tribune and Booman Tribune)

This is a political engagement with the writings of Richard Rorty, to add to LithiumCola’s wonderful obituary here.  Here I wish to contrast Rorty’s attitude toward academic discourse with that of "academic writing as real estate," which renounces democratic impulses because it has "an insensitivity to the dialogue requirements of public speech and prose," (Agger 123).  Against the concept of academic writing as real estate, Rorty sought to debunk the absolutist claims of academic conversationalists of all stripes.

In concluding, I wish to address Rorty’s later political stance, especially as regards his assertion on p. 15 of Achieving Our Country that "The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved, by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms."  This should be read, I argue, as a provocation to act, and in this context I would like to propose an academic Left with a political project: a global, ecologically-sustainable society.

Al Gore’s The Assault On Reason is largely an extended critique of the Bush administration’s policies.  But, in suggesting in his introduction that Chapters 1 through 5 of The Assualt On Reason, the first half of his book, would be about the "enemies of reason," Gore suggests a theory of the media, of history, and of reason that identifies Jurgen Habermas’ characterization of "the refeudalization of the public sphere" as a trend of the present era of politics (18).  So for this book review I will consider both Gore’s (2007) book and Habermas’s (1962, originally) book as analyses of media history.  Here I will concentrate upon the similarities of Gore’s template to Habermas’s.

Given the general paucity of DKos diaries on the subject of Rachel Carson (given, indeed, that yesterday was her 100th birthday), I felt that it would be important to commemorate, once again, her accomplishments, to read her biography and her most famous book and to tell you what’s in ‘em.  Maybe, someday, when we don't feel so obligated to use this time of year to memorialize the past war dead so that there don't have to be more future war dead, we can use this holiday to celebrate Rachel Carson's birthday.

(crossposted at Progressive Historians)

This diary offers a fresh re-visitation George Lakoff's book Whose Freedom? after SusanG's review of said volume.  Mostly, I am interested in placing Lakoff's advice in historical and political-economic contexts.  His concepts of "freedom" seem to be bound up with particular historical actors, and his opposition to "rationalism" seems to be overstated even if there is a core of truth to what he is saying.

This is my set of recommendations for summer reading for DKosers.  The reviews published here will take the perspective offered by Paulo Freire in his "On The Right And The Duty to Change the World" where he argues:

The future does not make us.  We make ourselves in the struggle to make it.

(crossposted at Progressive Historians)

This is a short diary about Jerry Falwell's friendship with Efrain Rios Montt, genocidal dictator of Guatemala.  Maybe Efrain Rios Montt will show up at Falwell's funeral.  Open question: what sort of "friends" were they?

Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, a two-volume work about the conflict between "civilization" and nature that was one of last year's best releases, is an extension of the motif of wilderness which is rooted in American literature, and thus its anti-civilization argument is less alien to American literary culture than its less sympathetic readers might imagine.  Jensen’s argument, though unduly pessimistic about human versatility, effectively disturbs the easy environmentalism of the "civilized," in which environmental concerns are ineffectually added to the status quo.