Remember Cooperative Learning? Critical Race Theory Falls Into the Same Panic-Filled Place

I must admit that it was a masterful job of labeling. Cooperative learning never had a chance.

That's not to say it was never happening before the controversy, sometime in the 1990s (I forget how long ago, but the phenomenon is quite fresh.). Yes, teachers were allowing students to work together on homework. They were teaching each other.

This was dangerous to those who weren't paying attention in their classrooms enough anyhow to realize that there might actually be value in it. Once they learned about it, though, it emerged as an ongoing threat to everything that made America great.

The old saw about the self-made individual came out, and overwhelmed all other creative thinking about how kids might learn better. People said really dumb things, like:

• How can you identify anyone's work if they do it together?
• Someone might get away with getting the same credit while doing less work than someone else. That never happens in the real world.
• Will testing go away, too? Maybe the kids will stop knowing how to take them. How can we tell who's smarter than anyone else? What would it now mean to get on the National Honor Society? How can we tell who will get scholarships? How can we save money on college?
• This country was built on the concept of everyone earning their own way. No loafing allowed.
• Sharing is wrong. Damn liberals. No accountability. This is socialist, or maybe even communist. At the very least, it's horribly un-American, a danger to our way of life.

Parents panicked. School boards cringed in self-defense: We didn't know this was happening! This needs a public airing! Where's Pontius Pilate?

So, of course, school administrators had to scurry about, promising that absolutely no cooperative learning would happen anymore. So they gathered their teachers together and told them that.

And the teachers, so horribly discovered (Aren't they sneaky?) and cauterized, went back to their classrooms and did none of it--for a while. Then, when the coast cleared, after the education and mainstream media (There they go again!) stopped paying attention to it, they went back to it without announcing it, knowing that: 

• administrators didn't know then and wouldn't know now that it was still happening; and 
• besides, as long as classroom problems diminished (which they did because kids got along better), they didn't mind a bit, since it sure wasn't hurting anything.

And nobody said a word. That's how nearly everything worked back in the day. And it may work once again with critical race theory, or CRT. 

Liberals are back making trouble! They're teaching that:

• Racism is systemic because it's been baked into many of our institutions;
• Everybody's a racist to some degree, which means we've been born terribly prejudiced (which is not our fault but there it is), though if we wanted to we could work on that;
• The country's very beginnings were filled with racism, because slaves became the tool for getting a lot of the tougher work done; besides,
• There isn't nearly enough discussion of the effects of racism on our lives in both the past and the present.

All of which are accurate. Let me assure you:

• Administrators will, once again, deny that such a thing is happening, whether it is or not;
• Teachers will teach what they wish about racism and either deny that they're engaging in critical race theory or not mention the phrase while they're actually doing it; and 
• Regardless of what state legislatures have already done and will do since some Republicans won't want to be called wimps, teachers will continue down the same road if they think it should be done.

Anything a legislature does will scare some teachers some of the time, and may make administrators review curricula for signs of critical race theory, however obscure or vague it may be, to say that they've done so. So yes, it will be slowed down some. For a while.

When ex- brings it up again, he'll brag that it has been removed from schools because of him, which again would be a lie. But conservatives love to condense ideas into neat little phrases and then rise up and suppress them, giving themselves non-victories over non-issues.

Meanwhile, in some form or another, and certainly not announced out loud, education will go on and address racism because racism has gone on, is going on, and will go on in an America tainted with it for all kinds of reasons. The most basic one is that the Europeans who came over here first were very used to its existence and considered it part of international trade--which it had been for at least a thousand years. 

Losers of wars ended up being slaves in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Being an unfortunate victim of a tribal leader's insatiable need for gold got you a lifetime sentence of slavery. Some slaves were respected enough to become soldiers, but some of them rose up and overthrew their rulers, too. 

You might also get shipped to the New World where, if you survived the awful trip, you lived a relatively short life of abject misery. Those facts are undeniable and also necessary to understand that the movement to not only end slavery but end the effects of slavery have gone on, and had to go on, for some time now. And because slavery is hard-baked into many societies' natures, going back those hundreds of years, it won't be eradicated any time soon, tragic though that is.

We have not taught that well enough; I know I didn't. You don't have to haul out a phrase like 'critical race theory' to keep trying to teach it better. But teachers will; they'll keep working at it. You can trust that. 

Knowledge builds on itself, whether people accept that or not. Someday, somewhere down the road where none of us can now see it, this truth, too, like cooperative learning, will overcome this temporary panic and set us free.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

McConnell's Trying to Deny History: Its Meaning, Its Substance

I'm reading a book about the year 1000. The event that that time nearly always invokes is the first European discovery of North America, featuring the expedition of Leif Ericsson, Viking explorer extraordinaire (who, apparently, wasn't the first).

While that's a feature of this book, it's actually kind of a sidelight. Because so much more has been discovered about civilizations that existed then, so much that has connected them through trade and even art. There is reason to believe, for example, that some Vikings, like the English Pilgrims later, got lost. That the Atlantic current carried the Norsemen beyond our coastline. It might have carried them to the Yucatan Peninsula.

How the heck they got there without all of them perishing would make one great interview. But the Mayan art of the time, writes author Valerie Hansen (nice Nordic name there), features paintings of people with blonde hair. Nobody who lived there at the time, nor natives who live there now, have such hair. And nobody else, from nowhere else, at least as far as we know--the point exactly--had decided to make the enormous leap into the unknown at that particular moment in history.

I taught Ericsson's travels to Cedarburg High kids, but I didn't know about the Mayan art. Wouldn't it have been terrific if we'd have known that, if that had been common knowledge? Wouldn't it have been fun to speculate?

Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. He says that we already know enough of what there is to know about January 6. We don't need to go over the same stuff, he says. We'll discover nothing new. It'll just be a rehash.

That's nonsense and he knows it. It was said casually, so he could slip by despite its impact. That comment is so empty it's beyond ridiculous. It's an ignorance of the meaning of history.

Think, for instance, of the thousands of books written about Lincoln. Even more about the Civil War. Believe it or not, like it or not, we're still discovering new information, more than a century and a half later.

Because history means an endless inquiry. It means going over the same event again and again and discovering more and more, things we couldn't have known before, things that bring decisions and mistakes into a new light. In other words, facts; something that Republicans seem to be avoiding at every turn.

It means that you're underlining something that either is important or should be, subjecting it to further research. To pretend that January 6 is an event that we simply need to move on past brings it into a comparison to burnt dinner, to blame it on the oven. It flushes responsibility right into a toilet of pretense. 

It insults the families of those who died--yes, on both sides, including the woman who was shot trying to enter the House chamber while the members were in session. They, too, deserve to know exactly what she was doing there, how she was misled, how deep was the rabbit hole into which she, too, dived.

Yes, there would be things reported that we already know. But to pretend that nothing else would be discovered is the height of denial. It is an attempt, tired though we now are to consider it, to whitewash reality. It feeds into the narrative of the very ex-president who fomented this chaos: Don't think about the past, just think about pleasing me.

McConnell is quoted as having told his fellow Senate Republicans that he would consider it a personal favor if they voted against a commission. That means that something like 37 chits will be called in at some point, minus the four who voted for it and the nine who didn't vote. He considered it that important that he will have to run around and satisfy that many future demands.

History happens regardless of result or intent. Journalists and historians like Valerie Hanson will continue to investigate, no matter how much McConnell wants to hold it back. The books that follow, after the research that taxpayers should pay for but are now blocked, will indict him and his fellow Republicans and make them look absurd.

Besides, the books about the horrible president we've just had have not ended. The ones that have been already written stand unmitigated and unlitigated. The uncovering of his corruption hasn't ended, either. A whole bunch of people who matter aren't letting that history slide, either.

The history the Senate Republicans make, too, will be all that more astonishing to future generations who will try to make sense of their utter abrogation of purpose. What follows from this cannot be good, but it will be enormously consequential. It will be placed eventually at their feet, like Leif Ericsson's, for another thousand years.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

One Year After George Floyd--Can We Handle Diversity? How 'Woke' Are We?

So it's been a year since George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, and many publications have gone out of their way to ask: Where are we now, and where should we go?

To that point: Are we any closer to eliminating the effects of racism? I wish I could say yes, but I doubt it. Black people are still getting killed by police, many of which under suspicious circumstances. It continues to be challenging, with qualified immunity, to bring police to their proper level of responsibility. Like much of the jurisprudence in this federalistic legal framework, it's a patchwork quilt, addressed on a case-by-case basis, which means that we have to wait for terrible things to fix instead of taking strides pro-actively.

The young white man who killed two people in Kenosha during the height of this business still hasn't stood trial yet. He proclaims his innocence. He is released despite a million dollars bond by a former Hollywood star who has taken the opposite tack from people like George Clooney and decided to go all-out in defense of reactionary, not merely conservative, causes.

Some Confederate statues have been taken down. Replacements haven't been built yet. But some of the most significant--like that of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the infamous 2017 march took place, and those of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia, during the World War I era, and much ballyhooed since--are being maintained with misplaced pride.

We know more about Black Lives Matter, but that phrase has turned into a rallying cry for reactionaries to automatically reject any calls for reconsideration of racial stereotypes. It cannot be enveloped into the political mainstream. Due to effective usage of innuendoes by people like ex-, any and all disruptions are often attached to it. It is relegated to the fringes.

But white supremacy, which is at the bottom of all this, seems to be gaining strength after January 6, along with guns and fierce talk. Power, and force, and the anger behind it, seem to be at the top of the agenda. Senate Republicans, one supposes, do not mind: They have just blocked any bipartisan inquiry of the insurrection. Among other things, they seem to want to dodge attachment to radicalism and white supremacy, or perhaps to attach them in subtler ways, as if that was possible.

Too late. I may be going out on a limb here, but to this point, not one media source on either side has located a Democrat among the insurrectionists; Fox or Newsmax or One America News would certainly have located, and called out, one by now. And at least one Capitol police officer of color was exposed to racist commentary as he was assaulted there. "Is this America?" he said.

Yes, sadly, it is. It isn't new, either. The attitudes sure aren't new, though. The newness is the blatancy with which racism is declared and established.

You could say, too, that the defiance and protests supporting people of color have also increased, and that resistance, those of the white supremacists, has by nature followed. Yes, by nature: America is full of countervailing forces, and those two are at, or near, the top of our dynamics. 

"We have never been one country," said one pundit the other day, and while that may be a bit strong, I would follow by saying what I've said since I've lived in our capitol for a year during the last decade and seen it myself in microcosm: We are too big now. There is too much fraying at the edges. We cannot handle diversity, looming though it may. It should be a strength, but far too many people have been swallowed up by pointless fear, and have been literally led to believe that it is harmful.

There are no encompassing ideas that will settle us into consensus. Maybe there never were, and our contrary illusions have been blasted away. Ex-, alone, cannot be blamed. He just did a better job of congealing attitudes than others have. What seemed like the legitimacy and effectiveness of anger did the rest.

George Floyd's murder did move the needle of awareness a bit, like that of Emmitt Till in the 1950s, the demonstrations and militancy of the 1960s, and the desegregation of the 1970s, until Reagan ripped the legs out from under and we've struggled to maintain some semblance of focus ever since. Yes, we became 'woke' in the past few years; we could hardly have done otherwise. But we also woke up to a renewal of racist underpinning, of hate, of mindlessness.

We remain, for now, in an oasis of decency and relative calm, with Joe Biden trying his best to stay on course. But with the displays of outright cowardice by Republicans who think nothing of the country but only of themselves, that time is wearing thin.

You can feel the anger growing again, can't you? And more absurdity: Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recount in Arizona, ridiculousness disguised as legitimacy. What we need--a better minimum wage, fixing a crumbling infrastructure, seeing to cybersecurity--are being drowned out. Once again: Failure to address these screaming needs is not conservatism. It is reactionism. It is a mindless attempt to replace the past with the past. It is an effort to avoid consensus. 

It is irrational and obsessive to stop the changes we need. We 'woke,' but so many of us want us to go back to sleep. That can't happen now, though. Too much of this has to go somewhere. Where it emerges no one can know.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Do We Dare Consider A Commission on Liberal Outbursts, Too?

I heard it while driving yesterday. It was one of those things that made me reconsider.

The insurrection of January 6 was one of the most awful events in our history. Of that, there can be little doubt. The storming of the U.S. Capitol to disrupt and potentially cancel the acceptance of the Electoral College vote, however perfunctory and functionally unnecessary, is an act of treason, whether its perpetrators understood it to be that or not (and I doubt that a majority of them did, caught up in the moment of hysteria; it would be pitiful if not so obnoxiously stupid and naive).

Now, Congress is trying to authorize a commission to study the event. On its face, it looks like overkill. We know what happened and why: the outgoing president, an evil and power-lusting man, tried to get someone to do his dirty work for him--certainly not new; it's his method of operation--and somehow get the presidency back, nullifying a fairly enforced election in which he lost.

His minions came close. They got inside the building and might have descended upon an ongoing session of the House and Senate had quick-thinking guards not diverted them in time. I almost wish they would have entered the chambers and been overwhelmed by the moment, as I think they might have been.

The FBI has taken control of the investigations of several hundred individuals who breached the building, violating federal law. Many of them will receive just punishment. They are certainly acting and saying things that indicate their remorse. I'm not sure I believe them. But it isn't like nobody's already looking into the event and analyzing it.

They came from all over the country; the clod who helped tear up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office hailed from Arkansas, for instance. So a Congressional inquiry, representing the nation as a whole, isn't exaggerating the scope.

They laid ruin to the place, too, in a gesture of nihilistic devastation. Walls and windows were wrecked and smashed. Some people also decorated the premises with their bodily waste. I think a commission might remind us of the disrespect.

But I'm no longer sure it should stop there. I heard someone comment on Wisconsin Public Radio and, just the way he put it, it makes some sense. To summarize: After all, some people also wrecked federal buildings elsewhere in the country. Shouldn't that be investigated, too?

I found myself considering that. Before the assault, people had also attacked federal buildings in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota--certainly not as bad as the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, but bad enough. Should that be simply written off as violent, inappropriate tributes to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter? 

Little has been written as follow-up. But those buildings are federal property, too. Should those attacks be considered tolerable because their origins are more closely attached to justice as January 6's is? If not trumpeted as also wrong-headed, wouldn't that encourage others to renew those attacks in the near future?

If nothing else, the caller lit me up. I get it now. I get where they're coming from. To understand is not to agree, but it is to accept that a deeper explanation and exploration of events may be more valuable than once thought.

This is dangerous territory. Anyone advocating for a commission to include the earlier attacks stands to be accused of making them equivalent--and, rhetorically, anything can be twisted to make it so. And anything that makes Black Lives Matter look less than sincere, or ultimately harmful, runs the risk of being labeled racist. Nerves are still taut. Exaggerations are still close to the surface.

But the notion isn't absurd. The danger is in Republican spinning of such an allowance, making it sound equivalent to January 6. Granted, what happened in Portland and Minneapolis was serious and definitely destructive, not the kind of place you want to take protest. But paying 'official' attention to it won't necessarily blow it out of proportion. What it may do is, in fact, reduce the inclination to add those incidents to conversations unnecessarily. It may in fact add proportionality to them, not detract. That sunlight, too, may be an excellent disinfectant.

Of course, the mere suggestion that such investigations be added might also create a chat storm that can't be turned away. And, to be honest, Democrats haven't had the entire corner on definitive facts.

Take, for instance, the ever-invoked Steele Dossier, funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign to trash ex-, which Devin Nunes made a point to haul out whenever given the floor in the House investigation of ex-'s first impeachment. That's the one, if you recall, that had ex- peeing on some bed in Moscow that Barack Obama was said to sleep on. There is no reliable evidence of that, as well as some other corruptive tidbits that Steele tried to forward. While that didn't make other investigated facts wrong, it cast doubt in some eyes upon Democratic reliability.

But the absence of the Dossier, or even its accuracy, wouldn't have changed many Republican votes, either. They had their own nonsense machine based on their hysteria, which certainly churned out far more non-facts and questioning that tried to disguise innuendoes; you only needed to listen in to about half an hour of the hearings to conclude that. 

So, if given the opportunity to investigate whatever makes them feel better, will Republicans conduct themselves with less vitriol, stick to reasonably determined facts, and make judicious conclusions? If you've seen Nunes, Louie Gohmert, Alex Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan, and now the seriously unhinged Marjorie Taylor Greene, let me ask: Do you trust them to do that?

There is also, of course, the time factor, and what to consider first. If Portland and Minneapolis were on top of the docket, the Republicans would try to delay open hearings for weeks, maybe months (which they might try to do anyhow), leaning into the 2022 mid-terms, which most pundits believe will go in their favor. Their anxiety would disappear in a hurry. Delay is a powerful tool. If it were forced to go second, Republicans would accuse Democrats of diminishing their importance with protocol.

All of this would put Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer into a tough spot. But putting one's head down and forging ahead is proving, however justified, to be bad politics. The odds of the Senate approving a singularly-directed January 6 investigation appear to be long. Why approve of something awful done by people who would overwhelmingly vote for practitioners of your party, without demanding that the other side's folks stand accountable as well?

So there it is. If everybody would just behave, one might be able to the to the truth of the matter. But it's quite evident by now that Republicans don't care or even want to know the truth, at least not the whole truth, or enough of the truth, about anything as long as they can win anyhow. Some have tried to act like January 6 was a tourist venture gotten a little out of hand, and others keep counting their state's 2020 votes as if they will find several thousand errors after the actual results have been reviewed three times or more.

This continuation of matters long since decided, this commitment to find something wrong with something so as to cast tremendous doubt where none rationally exists is the newest justification for future meddling caused by them, not by others. Something as momentous as an investigation of the worst breach of our very Capitol since 1814 would be otherwise be an invitation to establish incontrovertible truth. But it's also a naive wish to the now ridiculous question,  as said by Rodney King: "Can't we all just get along?"

We've known that answer for a while now. I wish it were otherwise. It isn't. Maybe there will be a commission on liberal outbursts as well, but I think we know what to expect from it.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

A Community for All? Too Much for Marathon County, Another Sad Fantasyland

I've been thinking about moving for some time now. My current abode has excellent location--can't have it much better, relative to grocery, pharmacy, and other advantages, even with and maybe especially because of the pandemic--so the precise area in which I might move becomes quite important.

But I'm not moving to Marathon County. I'd be an outsider, and a liberal, and that seems to be a bad idea at this point. 

The county's government made it a point to declare that it's not a community for all last week, which means that it feels that it might be a good idea to bar someone it doesn't like from joining it or at least living within its boundaries. It didn't say exactly who, but of course, it doesn't have to.

Seems that a bunch of people--one can safely assume that they're white--concluded that such a declaration meant that Marathon was a racist county. Let's explore that assumption a bit.

One possible conclusion is that such an accusation is accurate. If so, that wouldn't make Marathon much different from most other counties, including those with a whole lot more minorities living in them than it has, with 91 percent of its citizens white.

What it wants to do, above all, is avoid the shame of being called racist. So it won't take that on at all. It'll brush that aside. It'll easily acquiesce to what Tim Scott, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, said the other day after Biden's address to Congress: America isn't a racist country.

Oh? No vestiges left after slavery and the Civil War? Everything was okay then? And since? No demonstrations, no lynchings no structural racism? Don't feel bad, Republicans. It's okay. What does anybody else know anyhow?

If you pulled someone from that county aside, though, and mentioned some information that would lead them to conclude racist inclinations, you'd probably get agreement, as long as:

• It would be kept quiet, that is, out of media;
• They wouldn't have to admit it at some kind of gathering; and
• You would promise not to tell anyone else so as to identify them with liberals.

Kind of like the same mentality that was violated by Liz Cheney when she insisted on telling the truth about the 2020 election and insisting that other Republicans do the same, out loud. It's okay to admit that things aren't perfect, that America isn't living up to its reputation, that things need to be improved, as long as it's done under someone's breath so that someone else needn't take any responsibility for it.

That's the core problem: That America is going to be great again but we need to ignore, not fix, our core issues to get to that point. It's kind of like the attitude that ex- and his minions took about migrants from Central America: we'll fix that later, just ignore it and keep declaring that we're improving things. Except, with a growing number of people arriving, the problem's getting worse instead of better, and the baggage is getting heavier instead of lighter.

Said Fareed Zakaria on his show "GPS," several weeks ago: in 1950, the population of the U.S. was ten percent minority--a true minority. Today, it's forty-one percent and rising (nowhere near that in Marathon County). Our ex- was trying to hold it back, at least from getting to majority status with increasing speed, or doing so in a way that people could actually see and experience. 

That minorities actually present will continue to marry and bear children, and eclipse whites quite naturally, is an issue not discussed (and, with Republican insistence against abortion, a result to be brought about sooner, not later, as stupidly hypocritical as that is). It's a mentality for 1960, not sixty years later. It's not the fact of integration that's difficult, it's the admission of the fact, in spite of everything that surrounds.

Those who protest Marathon County being "a community for all," fall into that same category, and can, because of geography, continue to act ostrich-like. The minority individuals who live there now know that they cannot, and will not, admit that the world, their world, is changing and that they're still all right in spite of it, that their lifestyles haven't been somehow poisoned, that interaction need not be temporary or superficial.

It is, in a sense, an addictive behavior that's easy to fall back on. And such behaviors can end only starting with one event: an admission of a problem. Without it, such cancers only grow.

There's nothing falling apart in Marathon County that wasn't wrong in the first place--like real respect, and true tolerance, and admitting actual reality, things lacking for people other than white. Too many there, too, have fallen into the same wish: that a fantasyland has always existed and always will exist, despite what's clearly in front of them. It no longer shocks, but it does sadden.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Do I Still Have to Look at Him? Sigh.

The announcement that the organization of our ex- has now risen, so to speak, into a criminal, not just civil, investigation, has filled me with dread. No, not that kind of dread. Quite another.

Since his electoral defeat and banishment by Facebook and Twitter, there have been few pictures of him in media. After all, he isn't president anymore. He has been squirreling himself into his luxurious pad in Mar-A-Lago, and is due to wriggle himself out of it this weekend in North Carolina.

The great thing about that is that I haven't seen him much. I do despise him, but in a way I've reserved for few other people. He simply makes me upset when I see a photo of him.

So the above announcement has brought forward photos, often the same photos exactly, of him usually speaking, which is basically what he's done anyhow, from the past. I suppose the media's just doing its job, after all. I just can't stand it.

I don't wish him dead because it isn't Christian to do so. I just want him to go away for as long as possible until his ultimate demise.

Except he's going to have a meeting in which he'll spew his typical nonsense. And he wants no media coverage. Rather, he has ordered it.

That means he's going to tell everyone how he'll undermine Democrats and the media and whoever else is standing in his way, and do it so secretly that, or so he must think, nobody except Republicans will be able to figure it out until it's too late.

The problem with that is that everything he's done has been incredibly transparent. His sudden obsession with secrecy is not only not likely to work, but is actually unnecessary. Barring legal intervention on past wrongdoings--and that's an increasing possibility though still not a big one--he'll get away with whatever he's going to try anyhow.

Besides that, don't expect him to disappear. Autocrats crave the attention, so he'll be with us until he's dead. As Ariel Dorfman pointed out in the May 27 edition of The New York Review of Books:

As for [ex-'s] future, it could be like (Juan) Peron (strongman dictator of Argentina in the mid-20th Century), he makes a comeback. Or, also like Peron, who still hold his country in thrall almost fifty years after his death, Trump could continue to influence our vulnerable and imperiled land. Or perhaps a worse and more dangerous incarnation of his persona and policies is brewing right now [I would guess Josh Hawley]. What ever the coming years bring, we should not forget [ex-'s] terse last words as president, before being flown off to his Elba-in-Florida: "We'll be back in some form."

Unquestionably, the influence of his thinking was begun before he actually circumscribed himself on our political scene; the ridiculous notions and outright lies that carried him to the presidency, nearly twice, began far before but weren't catalysed successfully until 2016. As we have seen, that thinking has been catapulted into state legislatures and continues in the Congress by extremists elected in 2020. 

Do not count on successful prosecution, either. We already know that he's dodged that for his entire life in a number of realms. He knows all the angles. It will take a herculean effort, and at least a little luck, for that to transpire.

His alternative world lives on. We would do well to consider what it means, and confront it wherever it rears its ugly head. That's beyond his own head, which is ugly enough the way it is.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Typical Republican Playbook: Just Take the Money Away and That Will Fix Everything

Senator Ron Johnson and the other Republican members of Congress from Wisconsin have asked Governor Tony Evers to suspend the $300 per month unemployment payments to state residents. Beyond the fat chance that that's going to happen, it's xeroxed out of the Republican playbook.

Let's haul the cliches back out again: 

• You can't solve problems by throwing money at them; 
• If you give people money, they'll just sit on their backsides and won't look for work; 
• It's 'rugged individualism' (this one from the Great Depression, which failed for Hoover, too) that's made this country great.

Granted, the jobs report wasn't nearly as hopeful as the Biden Administration had projected it would be. By about three-fourths, in fact.

This isn't a good look. Biden was planning on businesses, and people, to have a bit more money to tide themselves over and get back on track. Which is to say, fill up some job openings that have been sitting there for as along as this virus has had us on hold, and in the meantime, pay some bills and get something to eat.

Like your Mom teaching you how to ride a bike, it felt great until you realized she wasn't pushing you anymore. In fact, I heard today that restaurants in the Milwaukee area are trying to hire new workers, but they haven't responded yet. Now, why is that?

The Chamber of Commerce, too, thinks it has this all figured out. As soon as the jobs report came out, it immediately recommended that the administration stop all handouts. That's not new thinking. It's tired Republican thinking, the thinking of those who run businesses and never got laid off themselves. It's rather automatic, rather knee-jerk. But those claims are true only if two things are also true:

• Those not working found no value in work; 
• Those who can't earn any more money than the minimum wage, which is absurdly low and hasn't been adjusted for inflation for a ridiculously long time; and
• The dollar amount they got from the government allows them to sustain themselves (and if they have families, them, too) for the foreseeable future.

Take it from someone who's been unemployed more than once in his life: The first isn't true. Yes, I got assistance from a state government or two, and yes, it certainly helped. But sit there without doing anything, especially if I could be earning more money while gainfully employed? Nonsense.

People have pride. It takes a lot to beat it out of them. But sometimes a lot happens. If it takes a long time to get a job, people give up. They gave up often during the past recession. I know I nearly did.

But I also knew that if I did, the original people who thought they should let me go would win. In the twisted minds which cut me loose from Cedarburg in the first place, they would justify it far more easily. (And no, I have not forgiven them nor will I ever. I'm not that big of a person. My removal had to do with unexplained vindictiveness because the obsequious superintendent told me with others around, "It's not about the money.") It was my goal to make it to the age of Social Security, one way or another, working until I could retire.

Could I start over, outside of education, at age 57? Uphill all the way. I didn't try to get back into anybody else's classroom. Who would take someone that old, with jobs that scarce, especially someone who had been a big union guy? Who would take on someone with that potential for organizing trouble?

Age discrimination was a major roadblock. It is sometimes not even subtle. People tell you that you're too old. They find ways to do it that avoid lawsuits. I got good at reading tea leaves after a while.

Usually you don't even get that far. Just get me in the room, I'd tell myself and by implication tell someone who could hear me only through my resume; you'll see.

There are sites that profess to know, really, really know, the trick to writing a good resume; all you had to do was pay a couple of bucks, if you had it, and they'd tell you. But it's mainly done through algorithms now, and they hook your paper to a computer which wrings out the humanity from all of it and treats you like the machine it is. And it's no guarantee of anything.

Previous prestige meant zero. Even my colleagues back in Cedarburg had no idea what I'd accomplished, no clue as to where I'd really been and what it had taken to get there. It was absurd to believe that anybody else did, either. And prestige achieved in another profession meant little to that which you aspired. That took a while to absorb. I'd had enormous success, but it was all inside a bubble.

It got so that actually getting a response, even a bad one, was a victory. At least they thought I had a chance, I'd say to myself, and I was good for another three or four days.

I'd come close, here and there. Interviews were like gold. Some of the work was far off and they didn't want to pay to get me in the room, where I knew I would knock them dead, so some did it by phone. I got better and better at phone interviews; I had one group in Nevada eating out of my hand, laughing at my jokes. I thought they were going to not only hire me, but adopt me as family. But I came in second. 

I could hear the voice delivering the bad news; I really had come close. They really were sorry. It was genuine. But the results were the same: still unemployed.

It would fill me with both hope and despair together. I felt like the dogs chasing the rabbit around the track: Always close, never quite there, and feeling a little dumb about it. But there was no one who would just give me a job, at least not one at the level at which I believed I deserved.

That's the other issue: Do you sweep floors instead? I chose not to. I let my savings dwindle. I spent through one IRA, but not the second: I drew a line there. But what if I did take a menial position? With the minimum wage what it is, and was, would it have made that much difference?

Instead, I plunged into debt. It took years to climb out. But I got there, just in time to retire. I had to give up the place I'd bought more than a decade ago, to which I might have gone and buried myself in withdrawal; living in rural Wisconsin was cheap enough, and I could have survived on my teachers' pension alone. But I couldn't do it. I knew I had more to contribute, and considering where I'd been, I had to try. And there was still Cedarburg. I would not let them celebrate upon my demise.

Yes, it cost me in time, money and emotional stability. But I have that victory. They snubbed me but they couldn't bury me. I endured.

It grinds away at your self-esteem, though. You know you're worth something to someone, but you can't prove it. You have to be invited first. You're out there on an island with no ship passing by. No one can help you.

And yes, the thought does occur to you: Maybe I should quit. And once re-hired somewhere, the enthusiasm for working isn't quite what it once was; too much energy and emotional juice has been spent getting there in the first place. The longer it takes, the deeper it gets. You can only get beaten down so far when it starts to matter.

I made it, but the struggle was enormous. I'm sustainable now. Unless inflation overtakes us--and you never know about that--I can live just fine on what's coming in. Had I simply quit back in 2009, though, my Social Security payments would be much less per month. The gamble paid off.

And--surprisingly, but a sign of economic recovery--I just learned that my monthly stipend from the state retirement system, after taxes, jumped some eight percent in the last couple of months. Not bad.

So the Chamber of Commerce, in their fine, stylish corner offices, can say what they want: The reality isn't  quite what they project. Work brings pride with it, but if it was that easy to get, that problem would be solved almost immediately.

And no, extra money to keep one in their homes and fed for a little while longer won't cause, by itself, an inclination to use the public trough as a permanent source; nor will it collapse the entire economy. We're some ways from that yet.

But that pride has a limit, too. Withdrawing that stimulus money and "letting the system manage itself" only works for those doing the philosophizing; they don't have to suffer the daily anxiety of being without a job, nor do they need to manufacture hope from whole cloth. 

It's real easy for Ron Johnson and Republican members of Congress to urge that people take away the safety wheels; they have well-paying jobs that, in my view, they don't deserve, either because people here are deluded or they've had the skids greased for them by gerrymandering, where all they have to do is show up and they get 60 percent of the vote without trying.

Obviously, they didn't get sick, either. That might be followed with genuine compassion. Outside of lip service, that's a little too much to ask. That isn't in the Republican playbook.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask inside. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark