Sal Khan & the Muppets’ Grover Explain the Electoral College

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

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

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

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

The take­away?

The Unit­ed States is an indi­rect democ­ra­cy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es 

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

Elec­tion 2012: Your Free Tick­et to a Pop­u­lar Stan­ford Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I assured him that his teacher would have his back.

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

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

See Metro UK for a com­plete tran­scrip­tion of both let­ters.

via Vin­tage Anchor

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

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

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

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

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

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

in Books, Current Affairs | August 2nd, 2016

we the people

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

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

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

You have sac­ri­ficed noth­ing and no one.

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lan­dau is African-Amer­i­can.

His adop­tive moth­er, Hath­away, is white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look and lis­ten.

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

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

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

via West­word

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Pep­per Spray­ing Peace­ful Pro­tes­tors Con­tin­ues; This Time at UC Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

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

628px-Butler_signing

Image by Niko­las Couk­ouma, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via The Huff­in­g­ton Post

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

in Current Affairs, Politics | June 23rd, 2016

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

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

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

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

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