http://www.inthesetimes.com/archives/tags/theory/ In These Times features award-winning investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, insightful analysis of national and international affairs, and sharp cultural criticism about events and ideas that matter. en-us Expression Engine jessica@inthesetimes.com seamus@inthesetimes.com Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3003/in_you_more_than_yourself/ In December, Time magazine's annual "Person of the Year" honor went not to Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Kim Jong-Il or any of the other usual suspects, but to "you": each and every one of us using or creating content on the World Wide Web. Time's cover showed a white keyboard with a mirror for a computer screen, allowing each of us to see his or her own reflection. To justify the choice, the editors cited the global shift from earthly institutions to the emerging digital democracy where individuals--you--are both citizen and king. There was more to this choice than meets the eye--and in more than the usual sense of the term. If there ever was an ideological choice, this was it: The… theory technology David Sirota Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3020/dreaming_up_new_politics/ In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president: The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an… theory politics David Sirota Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3060/reclaiming_what_makes_us_human/ The enemies of festivity have argued for centuries that festivities and ecstatic rituals are incompatible with civilization. In our own time, the incompatibility of festivity with industrialization, market economies and a complex division of labor is usually simply assumed, in the same way that Freud assumed--or posited--the incompatibility of civilization and unbridled sexual activity. In other words, if you want antibiotics and heated buildings and air travel, you must abstain from taking hold of the hands of strangers and dancing in the streets. The presumed incompatibility of civilization and collective ecstatic traditions presents a kind of paradox: Civilization is good--right?--and builds on many fine human traits such as intelligence, self-sacrifice and technological craftiness. But ecstatic rituals are also good, and… excerpt theory David Sirota Wed, 09 May 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3178/kurt_vonneguts_last_interview/ On April 27, Kurt Vonnegut was scheduled to speak in Indianapolis as part of the city-proclaimed The Year of Vonnegut. On February 28, in what was to be his last interview, I spoke by phone with Vonnegut, who was home in New York. We did not talk for long because he was not well, but we discussed memories of family vacations, his ancestors and what it means to be a family. Sadly, a member of our family is gone, a member of our karass, a true American, and one hell of a writer. The following is our conversation: What about Indiana explains why you write, what you write, and who you are? Well, there was certainly plenty to write about.… books theory David Sirota Thu, 10 May 2007 12:52:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3181/in_praise_of_pageantry/ This past January I spent a week in a chilly warehouse in Tacoma, Wash., making puppets with 20 other activists to support Army First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. We were creating a play to perform on Feb. 5 at the vigil outside the gates of Fort Lewis, Wash., where his court-martial--which would end in a mistrial--was being held. We spent hours painting, taping, cutting, gluing, eating and talking. For the characters in our play, we created a 15-foot-tall judge with a sculpted cardboard head and paper mâché hands, jurors and witnesses, and, for our finale, doves and suns to end with a vision of a beautiful future. But art and activism… activism art culture theory David Sirota Tue, 15 May 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3191/curiosity_and_a_cat_named_studs/ By the time you read this, Studs Terkel will have had a big birthday. On April 16, a month before he turned 95, I visited his stolid brick home in Uptown on Chicago's north lakefront. While he's had his "ups and downs" in recent months, his eyes still twinkle with the promise of more stories to tell. He waved me over to his customary spot, a rumpled chair in a sun-drenched corner of the living room. Studs was suited up in his trademark red-checked flannel shirt and red socks. A hefty stack of newspapers and magazines spilled over a table nearby. Perched perilously atop it sat the final manuscript of his upcoming (and first) memoir, Touch and Go, just back… books media theory David Sirota Fri, 18 May 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3183/the_dreams_of_others/ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others--this year's Oscar-winning film on life under the Stasi, the East German secret police--has often been favorably compared with Ulrich Becker's 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin!. The claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Lenin's sentimental Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East), illustrating how the Stasi terror penetrated every pore of East Germans' private lives. But is this really the case? Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film's plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so… europe movies theory David Sirota Fri, 25 May 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3185/whos_afraid_of_democracy/ Behavioral economists at UC San Diego recently conducted a study in which tokens were distributed among experimental subjects, with a few getting a concentrated chunk of the wealth and a majority getting little. They offered the "poor" subjects the opportunity to pay a price to take money away from the rich. The catch was that rather than being redistributed, the money would simply disappear. Economic orthodoxy predicts that few would snap at the chance, since they'd be paying for something that would confer no direct benefit. But they did. In spades. Though only one data point, it suggests that people have a profound sense of economic fairness, that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists. As far back as… economy theory voting David Sirota Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3256/giving_science_the_finger/ Here we go again. New scientific "evidence" has been released, bolstering the old claim that women who excel at math and science are less feminine--or at any rate more masculine--than their sisters who can't balance a checkbook or tell the difference between a phenome and a phoneme, but can talk up a storm. In the August issue of British Journal of Psychology, a team of researchers led by psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath, England, have published findings that suggest women who are good at science and math have longer ring fingers than index fingers, which indicates a relatively high level of prenatal exposure to the male hormone testosterone. Conversely, longer index fingers indicate higher levels of the… gender theory David Sirota Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3272/general_failure/ Largely unrecognized by the American public, unacknowledged by those in power, and denied by professionals in uniform, the United States suffers today from an enduring crisis in civil-military relations. The tacit social contract of mutual rights, obligations and expectations that binds the three parties to this relationship--the military, its civilian overseers and society--is seriously frayed. This isn't a crisis in the popular sense of the term. We need not fear a coup d'état from a military thoroughly socialized to sublimate such dramatic recourse. Troops aren't occupying our homes (even though, as major newspapers and the American Civil Liberties Union have reported, they are monitoring our communications and infiltrating our gatherings). American combat units aren't disintegrating in combat or openly defying… military theory David Sirota Tue, 14 Aug 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3302/the_kids_arent_alright/ Toward the end of his must-read article about race and the U.S. incarceration epidemic in the July/August 2007 Boston Review, Brown University economics professor Glenn C. Loury argues that, when it comes to understanding criminals, we must "recognize a kind of social responsibility for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons." While not entailing a denial of personal responsibility, Loury writes: Society at large is implicated in an individual person's choices because we have acquiesced in--perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds--social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of self in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless… books theory David Sirota Fri, 31 Aug 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3298/creating_the_21st_century_library/ When you enter the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, the first thing you notice is "rock star" librarian Nancy Pearl--in action figure form. It's the first hint that you've stepped inside an unconventional library. Megan and Rick Prelinger's vision of engaged learning is at odds with the weighty atmosphere that often pervades spaces containing 40,000 items--ranging from books to maps to films--intended for research purposes. Rick first achieved fame in the archivist world when his collection of 60,000 16mm educational films, known as the Prelinger Archive, was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2002. Three years later, after the dot com bust had dragged down commercial rents, the couple leased a 1,700-square-foot warehouse space in San Francisco's SoMa (South… books media theory David Sirota Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3304/restoring_classroom_justice/ When the Chicago School Board passed a Student Code of Conduct on June 27 that made "restorative justice" a central approach to school discipline, a coalition of Chicago students, parents and educators celebrated a step forward in a four-year-long organizing campaign. "Young people were being expelled and arrested for everything from throwing a pencil in class to pushing a teacher," says Yusufu Mosley, an organizer for the prison-abolition group Critical Resistance. Restorative justice programs focus on using community networks and dialogue to reconcile the offender to the community. "It's about trying to find resolution rather than being punitive," says Mosley. The growing movement for restorative justice in schools is partially a response to "zero tolerance" policies that require students to… education theory David Sirota Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3287/a_freegan_world/ Let's imagine the world as a bizarre neighborhood. On the sunny side of the street some individuals are so rich they can afford to live in castles or mansions. They can travel around the globe in hours instead of weeks, and they throw away enough food to feed a small country. The United States alone produces enough to feed the whole world several times over. Simultaneously, on the darker side of the 'hood, people die unnecessarily of easily remedied ailments and/or lack of food. Every night, millions go to bed starving, our city streets are barracks to armies of the homeless, and the planet we depend on for our existence is being poisoned to death by carbon emissions and industrial… activism environment theory David Sirota Fri, 14 Sep 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3320/trending_towards_inanity/ If you wanted to ruin the political career of Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief pollster and strategist, here would be one way to do it: First, create some sort of artifact bearing his name that you could use to tank his reputation. A book would do perfectly. Title it something buzz-wordy and superficial, like Microtrends, though perhaps that's too heavy-handed. Fill it with vapid koans, like "small is the new big" and "the biggest movements in America today are small." To make it seem authentic, you'd want to ape Penn's long-standing affection for combining demographic salami-slicing with cutesy-naming (this is the man who foisted "Soccer Moms" upon our weary lexicon), making each short chapter an exposition of ever-more absurd groups--think… politics theory David Sirota Fri, 28 Sep 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/ Freedom is late. Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000. A visit to the "news" section of freedomship.com reveals a more sluggish pace. The most recent messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how "scam operations" are slowing things down but that "[t]hings are happening, and they are moving fast." Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished. Indeed, it is not yet started.… class economy theory David Sirota Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3367/survival_of_the_adapted/ Kenny Fries' The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (Carroll & Graf) is not so much about disability, as it is about adaptation--but adaptation in the same way that the X-Men's mutations are adaptations. Fries--a well-known poet and essayist who edited Staring Back, which many consider the foundational anthology on disability--was born without fibulae, with sharp anterior curves of the tibia and flexion contractures of the knees. He begins with a story about hiking in which he outdoes his able-bodied lover in a particularly harrowing stretch. But Fries never pretends to be heroic. The ease with which he manages up a rocky incline is the result of his much stronger upper body--an adaptation to compensate for… books theory David Sirota Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3365/harry_potter_and_the_muggle_activists/ Imagine a world faced with unpredictable attacks that are carried out by a cult-like network. Led by a charismatic figure that is rarely ever seen or heard from, this network continues to claim responsibility for heinous acts that include random kidnappings, the destruction of bridges and mass murders. Stateless and living among the masses, its members have become so hard to track down that the government is at a loss. Officials have begun to focus more on the image of "looking tough" than on creating real safeguards to protect its citizens. The world has become haunted by fear. It is no longer a question of whether there will be another attack, but when that next attack will happen and how… books theory David Sirota Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:10:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3393/the_disturbing_sounds_of_the_turkish_march/ On September 16, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner warned the world that when it comes to Iran's nuclear program: "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war." The statement, predictably, caused great uproar, with criticism focused on what Sir John Holmes, head of the U.N. refugee agency, called the "Iraq taint." After the scandal about Weapons of Mass Destruction as the excuse for invading Iraq, evoking such a threat forever lost its credibility. Why should we believe the United States and its allies now, when we have already been so brutally deceived? There is, however, another aspect of Kouchner's warning that is much more worrying. When the newly elected French President, Nicolas Sarkozy,… europe theory war David Sirota Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3406/the_new_road_to_serfdom/ In the early '80s, as Margaret Thatcher attempted to hack away at England's substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn't fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile's aggressive… books corporation theory David Sirota