Colonizing Measures
The UCR [Uniform
Crime Reports which originated in 1929] reveals more about police
behavior that it does about criminality. Some law enforcement agencies
falsify the reports they submit to the FBI. Once a citizen reports a crime,
police must make an official record for the crime to be counted in the UCR.
Sometimes, however, law enforcement officers do not complete a crime report.
For example, in Atlanta, crimes that were reported to police were not recorded
for a number of years to help the city land the 1996 Olympic Games and boost
tourism. In 2002 researchers discovered more than 22,000 missing police reports
that were never submitted to the FBI. Those reports included more than 4,000
violent offenses that were committed but never counted....Both individual
officers and police departments may take these steps in response to the extreme
pressure they face on a daily basis on a daily basis to demonstrate that they
are doing their job. (Regoli and Hewit, Exploring Criminal Justice,
Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008)
***
Teacher Friend:
I'm getting tired of folks referring to Thoreau
as strictly a "nature writer."
Nemesis:
you see how the world shrinks our giants?
Dismissing a political thinker by asserting his
irrelevance to the human due to his ostensible subject. HE is over there
apart from us and only writing about things that no one SHOULD care about
because humans do not live naturally. we simply use nature. We must
minimize T because he makes us very aware of all our failures...they are so
obvious that we must simply willfully make him say the opposite of what he
saying.
go out right now and get Dave Graeber's two
recent books Debt and The Democracy Project.
Call it your Christmas gift of awareness....then share liberally, er,
anarchically (I guess then I should just pirate them for you...)
TF:
A society where we continue to elevate the lowest
common denominator.
N:
nah, it's a pervasive ideology of the human out
of nature...
TF:
My comment was in regard to your "shrinking
our giants" comment.
Our students know that Paul Walker died (Fast
& Furious) but not Nelson Mandela.
We elevate the unimportant, entertainment aspect
of our lives as our own form of SOMA; and disregard the "real work"
of those who challenge the societal code.
But yes..... I agree totally with your HDT
passage.
"HDT, that silly guy, who lived out in the
woods by himself and wrote about nature."
N:
yes. of course...the America in which Paul
Walker is any kind of news or person in which you might take an interest is an
example of how Empire valorizes active ignorance.
The wealthiest government is the most powerful
due to military might...at anytime anywhere the US Military and/or its proxy
can knock on our collective doors ("home" and "abroad").
So, our inane existence, our lack of human awareness and self-awareness,
IS required as we fund and support the most murderous and ruthless empire
since, what, Genghis Khan?
If you're not anesthetized to this, and then
"convinced" of the country's "exceptional" godly goodness
(and thus "election") you cannot believe you're complicit.
TF:
This is an insurmountable battle --- as in, our
youth drink from that Holy Cup of ignorance daily; without any intentionality
or self-awareness.
A senior (a very fine young man) was speaking
candidly with me yesterday that our top five students (who are competing for
Valedictorian) are all cheaters and plagiarists..... to the point of PURCHASING
old quizzes, tests, projects from alums who want to make a profit off their
high school endeavors. This is what we've come to: purchasing our way to
the top (even in education), and turning that into a for-profit venture by past
cheaters, er, successful Americans.
I was baffled! He responded: "Mr. TF,
don't think for a second that they don't already have your class 'purchased'
for next semester."
He, like many of this generation, feels more
obligation to his peers/friends than to what is right and just. These guys
defend bad behavior all the time -- they're not just quiet about it, in that
they don't "rat" out friends, they DEFEND it.
***
...even if the measure, when first devised, was a
valid measure, its very existence typically sets in motion a train of events
that undermines its validity. Let's call this a process by which "a
measure colonizes behavior" thereby negating whatever validity it once
had....
...officials of the French absolutist kings
sought to tax their subjects' houses according to size. They seized on the
brilliant device of counting windows and doors of a dwelling. At the beginning
of the exercise, the number of windows and doors was a nearly perfect proxy for
the size of a house. Over the next two centuries, however, the "window and
door tax," as it was called, impelled people to reconstruct and rebuild
houses so as to minimize the number of apertures and thereby reduce the tax.
One imagines generations of French choking in their poorly ventilated "tax
shelters."
...the SAT is not just the tail that wags the
dog. It has reshaped the dog's breed, its appetite, its surroundings, and the
lives of all those who care for it and feed it. Its a striking example of
colonization. A set of powerful quantitative observations, once again, create
something of a social Heisenberg Principle in which the scramble to make the
grade utterly transforms the observational field....the SAT has so reshaped
education after its monochromatic image that what it observes is largely the
effect of what it has itself conjured up.
...measures of performance that are quantitative,
impersonal, and objective was, of course integral to the management techniques
brought from Ford Motor Company to the Pentagon by "whiz kid" Robert
McNamara..."General, show me a graph that will tell me whether we are
winning or losing in Vietnam."...McNamara had created an infernal audit
system that not only produced a mere simulacrum--a "command
performance," as it were--of legible progress but also blocked a
wider-ranging dialogue about what might, under these circumstances, represent
progress. They might have heeded a real scientist's words, Einstein's:
"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be
counted, counts."
(Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism,
Princeton University Press, 2012.)
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