Pedagogy vs. Indifference in Teaching Students History

Was sitting in the park texting this to myself today: In continued contemplation of a series of discussions i had lately, I concur with my own position. In lines with Howard Zinn, one cannot be neutral on a moving train. Be it objective journalism or responsible teaching, in alignment with postmodern thinkers like Foucault, nothing is ever objective. The objectivity that is considered idealism in a classroom or a media outlet, for me is an irresponsible cold-indifference. Take for instance my recent debate on whether my own middle-class high school system had a good history department or not, I felt that my high school history program in the 1990's was not worthy enough of praise. First off, the teachers were primarily football and track coaches. They taught history as if it was a game, a sense of trivia. They spoke of their favorite athletes more often than current history in the making in the 1990's. If they spoke of history it was history of the past. History, I learned after 9/11, when I started intensely reading global history and US foreign policy. History I learned was a tool for making change and making a voice. Never did my education in the 1990's focus on the genocides that were happening while I was a child, that were preventable: Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, East Timor, El Salvador, Panama, the Balkans, and more. Instead, as products of American media great distraction, the 1990s was all talk about Clinton sex scandal, not his bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the meddling of the 96 Russian election. Media diverted our eyes to focus on Tanya Harding, OJ Simpson, Amy Fisher and more. And our media and educators did not take a moral ground. One discussion I had recently with a friend was about the reason that journalists have to be objective. Objectivity in media is not brave, just as in the classroom. Relaying the information to students and viewers does have to be responsibly displayed, but the assumption there that listening ears know what is right from wrong and can make concerned opinions. ...However, if the observer has never been taught what is right from wrong, then all the objectivity is indifferent. For example, when a corporation poisons local drinking water be it in New York State or in Bhopal, India. If the observer is only seeing that this is good for business capital and these children are externalities, what does it say about the indifference from the media market system? As in the example of discussing why the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when it has been proven that Truman knew the Japanese were going to surrender and he did not have to drop the bomb, it is not brave for a reporter or a teacher to just relay the information. Because what happens when we teach or report on the horrors of the Holocaust? We hope that our children or our citizens know that this was ethically incorrect, but as we see, there are many Americans who still embrace the Confederacy. A Teacher or Reporter has to do more than just objectively report on atrocities, they have to be brave enough to point out the crimes. It isnt enough to say that there are not two sides to discuss the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered innocent people. We also have to reflect on how many US corporations traded with the Nazis and knew it was wrong and did not get held accountable: IBM, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Ford and more. Otherwise there is no Code of Ethics, just sharing indifferent random facts. ... Obtaining facts and keeping the accuracy of the facts is vitally important. Facts can often as we have seen be twisted for personal gain. Hence the pretense for Bush-Cheney's false wars that callously invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, but whose private corporate interests from weapon sales to oil profits were obviously gained. It is our responsibility as journalists, teachers and parents to make sure we provide a Code of Ethics too, because if we don't than who will? We have to be brave to not be indifferent, we have to when we contradict our stances admit hypocrisy, so that we can be more accountable, and we have to acknowledge that if not us, then who?

Books on Sale: Worthy Insights and Real Life Experiences:

With the publication of my latest book Levitation's Defeat I have completed presenting the work that I have written over the last seventeen years of my life. Rather than keeping my work in storage just waiting to one day get published I have decided that self-publishing through Amazon's Create Space was a launching pad. Rather than being hidden away at least now someone like you may stumble onto my work and find value in the process. My books are in many words Biomythographies as Audre Lorde claims the term. Part of them are myth and part of them are biographies. My characters are not necessarily my own story but their lives and journeys parallel my own. Perhaps at times the genders, the races, the sexual identities differ from my own, but the directions and experiences here attempt to collect the human condition that individuals have been exposed to amongst this political and economic contemporary climate weathered within the first two decades of this new century.  

1) Levitation's Defeat: An American in Mexico                                           
2) Adjunct Lover: Teaching in America               
3) Apoplexy: My Year of Living in Malawi    
4) Soon Be Crossing Great Waters: Essays       
5) Braune and Rice: Unemployment in Chicago

6) No Strong Storm Denied: A Possible Future...          
7) Desiring Something Radical: From San Fran to The Hague 
8) Gravity of the Mouth: A Search for Democracy: Global Traveler.
9) The Pariah, The Parrhesiast, And The Tireless Flies: Teaching in Korea
10) Funneling to Junta: Washington DC or bust.             
11) Fueling a Devotion of Thought: Road Trips and Stories.

Before you Celebrate George HW Bush, What Should Be Spoken About Him:

All this talk of praise and family values of the former president are making me nauseas.  Tell that to the families in Iraq, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and more…

In the recent past, former President George Herbert Walker Bush has passed away. No matter how many people tell us that we should praise him as a past president, the truth is once one delves into factual history and researches this man, one cannot praise him. From all of the far left and far right texts, foreign policy and national agenda that I have read on this man, he deserves to go down in history as a true nasty bastard who did more against the preservation of Democracy and Liberty than to support its growth. No U.S. president or American political figure in the 20^thCentury has stirred such emotion to abhor than George HW Bush. He plundered democracy for Corporate Interest and made the world less safe for the global community. 

Some would say that now is not the time to speak of his faults, but speaking of them now continually may bring more awareness because currently his son and other past living presidents need to be held responsible. This man was not held responsible and got to live his long life in leisure; his victims did not. George HW Bush did not make mistakes; every political action that he followed through with was carefully planned and well manufactured. He did not often put his foot in his mouth professionally, regardless of his moments of inappropriately groping women off camera, but noted in the era of #metoo; like his contemporary, Dick Cheney, he would use precision and the corporate media support to enact his presentation with the American public as one audience and then behind closed doors with CEO’s provide them with the tools to keep the rich elite at the top regardless of the world of change socially evolving from post-WWII to today.  

George HW Bush was trained at an early age for his corporate governing role. His father Prescott Bush was a Senator and was a businessman with close ties to the steel industries that were benefitting during World War I and World War II. His own father had been linked with his business partners in Europe to selling weapons to Nazi Germany during World War II and knowing what the Nazi’s were doing with their weapons; teaching his son that business was more important than human life, he kept this message tight.

Like father like son (and like grandson), George Bush Sr. got his entry into American governance and politics, after he was a soldier during the war, by entering into the decades after World War II, as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. The first phase of America’s century of global dominance had the CIA run by Allen Dulles; Dulles was a good friend with Prescott Bush. The CIA in its first few decades after the war was solely for rich white men from elite families. The fraternity, as writers Tim Weiner and Patrick J. McGarvey, a former agent confessed, had an agenda of special interests, above and beyond democracy. When leaders who were democratically elected that the corporate elite didn’t like, stable dictators were put in place to make sure capitalism was more valued than civil and human rights, from Guatemala to Chile to the Congo to Indonesia. This form of nurturing had been key to the leadership George HW Bush was bound to continue once his opportunity to get in the driver seat came about. 

When the next generation of CIA leadership arrived, around the start of the Richard Nixon presidency, which was a continuation of the World War II mentality that brought General Eisenhower to presidency and Nixon as his vice-president; George HW Bush became the head of the CIA. Four individuals who seemed to survive the Nixon Scandal unscathed in government were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and George Bush Sr. With the exception of Kissinger, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney would have heavy ties to corporate elite, especially in the oil and chemical industries. They were emblems of the War Industrial Complex. 

In the decade before the peak of George Bush Sr.’s key decade of power, he was already with precision taking the reigns as the head of the CIA under President Nixon, President Ford, and President Carter. There was no secret that he did not know about. He was not a civil rights advocate, a women’s rights advocate, he did not involve himself in any social or political issue that required speaking for the underdog and underrepresented. He was not concerned with the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan’s harsh tactics towards protestors against the Vietnam War or achieving Civil Liberty at home. What did matter to him was the growing awareness that the Middle East was getting restless. The Iran Revolution had disposed of an ally, oil-partner and dictator the Shah of Iran. 

Often when historians talk about the faults in President Jimmy Carter’s presidency, they mention that he seemed to always get the information just too late to really react to crisis in a timely manner. On his watch, the CIA was linked to the violence in Central America. In El Salvador, the dictatorship was worried about public unrest, and during its crack down, the Priest Oscar Romero was murdered. The Carter administration like previous ones and especially in the 1980’s gave weapons to dictators to use against their own people. International politics and the need for a president to act would often come to the president’s hands via the Central Intelligence Agency. The head of the CIA was George Bush Sr. and did he know that if he made a humanitarian president look weak in foreign policy, he would become Vice-President in a few years? 

A Vice-President can have no power or can have a significant influence on the most powerful position in the United States. Before Dick Cheney was the vice-president for George W. Bush, George HW Bush was the vice-president for Ronald Reagan. As Cheney was for Bush Jr., Bush Sr. was for Reagan. Evidence has come out that during the 1980 election, individuals in the Reagan campaign had negotiated with the Iran government during the Iran Hostage Crisis. They had negotiated with terrorists to release the hostages after the election rather than before the election so that Carter would not gain the rewards for the act of diplomacy. Hence, the CIA was not oblivious. In exchange, the Iran government would get weapons from the U.S. government. Reagan became President, George HW Bush became Vice, and Iran gained weapons to fight in the Iran-Iraq War.

While all of George Bush’s training as CIA chief during the 1970’s reflected on his direct knowledge globally of corporate America’s meddling overseas, the 1980’s would be his staple on history as Vice President and then as President of the United States. Reagan can take responsibility for the Iran-Contra Scandal; he can take responsibility for arming the CIA–backed counter-revolutionaries in Sandinista Nicaragua; all of the tens of thousands of human beings killed under the U.S. lead War on Drugs in South America; but George Herbert Walker Bush is responsible for continuing those very policies into his own presidency and he very openly in public gave Ronald Reagan and other individuals full-pardons for any crime that was committed by the previous president. Human beings died and were murdered but all the innocent individuals in Latin America and the Middle East were called externalities or collateral damage. This was never the America that supported Democracy and Human Rights.  This was the precursor to Bush’s White House Administration.

Before continuing into President George HW Bush’s Crimes Against Humanity overseas that made the world more dangerous and directly contributed to the rise of fundamental terrorism; at home in the United States, George Bush made the country not just unsafe from outside terrorists, but he made America less healthy and less safe with his embrace of corporate interests from chemical companies, like Monsanto. In the early 1980’s there is a famous video easily available on the Internet of Vice President Bush walking around the laboratories of Monsanto. Monsanto, if you are unaware of still today, was a chemical weapon supplier for the United States’ military during the Vietnam War and, during the Iran-Iraq War, the former Nixon staff member Donald Rumsfeld, and top board member of Monsanto, had supplied chemicals to Saddam Hussein. The U.S. had propped up Saddam Hussein as the corporate oil elites new favorite dictator after Iran had its revolution. When Bush was walking around the lab of Monsanto, he was recorded saying that this is the future of America. Since, then and once Bush became president, Monsanto became the number one supplier of pesticides and fertilizers, number one property-rights owner of seed grain, and number one genetic modifier of foods. America is awash in cancers, diabetes, thyroid issues and other health hazards due to the leadership of George Bush accepting corporate profits over health standards inside our grocery stores.   

George Bush Sr. does not deserve any praise for his years of service in the United States. His service was solely for the corporate elite’s private monetary gains. He blatantly ignored the Constitution of the United States when once he became president he gave pardons to Reagan and his staff for illegal military activity. Then as President he invaded two nations: Iraq and Panama. He went into Iraq not because he cared about the freedoms of Kuwait. He went into Iraq because of oil. He wanted to send a message to Saddam Hussein that the Persian Gulf was off limits for him and that oil was more important to Bush’s special interest and not Saddam’s special interest. So many other countries had liberty and freedom threatened during 1989 and early 1990’s and President Bush did not bat an eye at genocide in the Balkans, genocide in Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, East Timor, and more. Yet, Bush never invaded any region that was not a significant trade destination. 

George HW Bush was no Nelson Mandela. Nope, Bush invaded the Middle East solely for oil. He invaded Panama for the benefit of the canal. In fact, not once during George Bush Sr.’s years in any political office did he criticize Apartheid South Africa; he supported, sometimes quite openly he supported, the racist regime in South Africa because one of America’s most important natural resources other than oil comes from SA: Uranium. Uranium fuels nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and is nearly always on the tips of the bombs that U.S. drops in every corner of the globe. Once Lockheed and Martin bombs are dropped, they not only kill people immediately, they deplete the soil and make the land uninhabitable for the next two or more generations. Uranium exposure is often linked to leukemia. Bush has always been a fan, since back in his father’s day, of corporations that utilize dangerous natural resources. As well, when it comes to the trade routes of such commodities they are also important to protect. 

When George HW Bush invaded Panama, he did not hesitate to mention that Noriega was a dictator who was holding his people in ransom because of drug money and power. However, anyone who has studied foreign policy knows that the number one consistently dominate force controlling and holding Panama back from any form of development is the United States, because the Panama Canal is vital for its easy and cheap access. If any government does not want to have the CIA wipe them out in Central America, they have to make sure U.S. corporate interest in Panama is protected. George Bush Sr. invaded, as he did in Iraq, and took out the dictators that he had previously assisted in getting into power. The U.S. put Saddam into power and they also put Noriega in power. Noriega had deep ties to the U.S. intelligence agency and Bush was the head of America’s intelligence agency. 

Undermining democracy and human rights overseas does not make America great. Wealth at the expense of other people’s happiness and survival is not wealth at all. George HW Bush was not only complacent with dictators, as we give Donald Trump beef about it in the past year, Bush actively put them into power and supported them. He stood in photos with Indonesia’s Suharto, South Korea’s Park Chung Hee, and the King of Saudi Arabia. He supported Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile, and undermined democracy in Haiti when the population voted for Aristide. 

But it gets even scarier; the Bin Laden family has long been an oil business family in Saudi Arabia. George HW Bush has long been involved in oil companies, especially his post-Presidency companies the Carlyle Group, and its subsidiary Brown and Root. His business ties and personal communication with the Bin Laden Group is factual. He has often met the father and brothers of Osama Bin Laden. Michael Moore even in his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11covered the fact that the Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the country when all other flights were cancelled throughout the United States on the day of.  Other writers have covered these events as well. The pre-9/11 United States can remember when George HW Bush invaded Iraq during the 1990’s; however, many citizens are not aware that the U.S. at that time created a permanent military base in Saudi Arabia. This reflects America’s longstanding collusion with the crimes against humanity that the Saudi kingdom carries out. Some researchers say that Osama Bin Laden claimed that he only got more radical because of the first Iraq War and the creation of a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia. Without Bush Sr.’s actions in Saudi Arabia in the 1990’s, fundamental terrorism from the region may never have been nurtured by those who survived the acts by atrocious dictators if the U.S. was not friend’s with atrocious dictators. 

President Clinton, President Obama and President George Bush Jr. have all bowed down to the Saudi King; they have shaken hands of dictators and have also all have supported the U.S. corporate elite from Monsanto to Exxon to Lockheed and Martin. If President Trump dies tomorrow, are you going to say now is not the time. Popular opinion says that many of us would cheer. 

Real ethics isn’t about wishing a former President’s family sadness on the day that Bush Sr. died; real ethics is holding him accountable for his crimes and acknowledging the President’s lack of Ethics in supporting dictators and corporate interests over human life. His family has a history of mass-murder from Prescott Bush selling weapons to the Nazi’s to George HW Bush and his son bombing and killing tens of thousands of innocent families in Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan, and more; and none of them apologized or gave those families “blessed day.” 

When Charles Manson died people said good riddance. This guy George HW Bush has callously executively ordered the murders of over 500x times the amount of people that Manson had killed. Capitalism and the corporate media ignore the facts. History can at least come clean and tell the truth. If Bill Cosby had died and no one else knew that he was a serial rapist but his victims and you, would you feel that it was important to let the world know and not let him carry the title of a real family man? George Bush Sr. was a murderer for the 1% and he was coldly indifferent to their deaths. Is that not a characteristic of a sociopath? When President Trump uses tear gas on women and children at the border of Mexico, who travel from Central America, remember, George HW Bush had made those nations unsafe due to his CIA and governance meddling for twenty years. When people say that Hitler was a good politician but ignore his crimes; why does a Democracy have more of a right to kill than any other form of governance? From petroleum to uranium, from weapon sales to canals, George HW Bush plundered human life for profits in Iraq, Panama, from South Africa to El Salvador, and more untold. If he cared about family values, he wouldn’t have destroyed so many families.  George Bush Sr. was also no real family man, mistresses, nonconsensual groping, and all.  

Update on Publications:

With the publication of my latest book Levitation's Defeat I have completed presenting the work that I have written over the last seventeen years of my life. Rather than keeping my work in storage just waiting to one day get published I have decided that self-publishing through Amazon's Create Space was a launching pad. Rather than being hidden away at least now someone like you may stumble onto my work and find value in the process. My books are in many words Biomythographies as Audre Lorde claims the term. Part of them are myth and part of them are biographies. My characters are not necessarily my own story but their lives and journeys parallel my own. Perhaps at times the genders, the races, the sexual identities differ from my own, but the directions and experiences here attempt to collect the human condition that individuals have been exposed to amongst this political and economic contemporary climate weathered within the first two decades of this new century.  

1) Levitation's Defeat: An American in Mexico                                           
2) Adjunct Lover: Teaching in America               
3) Apoplexy: My Year of Living in Malawi    
4) Soon Be Crossing Great Waters: Essays       
5) Braune and Rice: Unemployment in Chicago

6) No Strong Storm Denied: A Possible Future...          
7) Desiring Something Radical: From San Fran to The Hague 
8) Gravity of the Mouth: A Search for Democracy: Global Traveler.
9) The Pariah, The Parrhesiast, And The Tireless Flies: Teaching in Korea
10) Funneling to Junta: Washington DC or bust.             
11) Fueling a Devotion of Thought: Road Trips and Stories.

Levitation's Defeat: An American in Mexico

Newest Book from Last Year's Life in Tehuacan, Mexico:

When one is asked to help strengthen an institition, this does not necessarily mean that the individuals involved are interested in making such changes. Miranda is an American teaching at a university in Mexico between 2016 and 2017. Her and Alex are United States Peace Corps Response volunteers in a cultural and professional exchange in the city of Tehuacan. Alex is a New Yorker with some highly interesting friends. Miranda's diverse identity as an adopted American from Russia with indigenous Buryat roots leads her to having to justify her choices in life while teaching responsibly. She learns the challenges that befall the higher educational system in Mexico and is willing to highlight the beauty of the culture and people that are being burdened by modern day politics.

The narrator is a character known as Miranda. She was chosen as a protagonist because several of my lesbian friends shared with me that they do not like to read novels any more because they cannot find protagonists that they can relate to. The author hopes this novel provides enough justice to inspire their voices.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1986476995/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521204775&sr=1-12

Adjunct Lover

The Newest Book to be published by Michael Neiman is now available.

Synopsis:

The Adjunct Professor is a paradigm for the best and worst of the American education system; reflecting on the declining appreciation of teachers when universities care solely for more money at the top of the hierarchy, Eliot Mead is an adjunct looking to survive financially while to thrive in the classroom responsibly. Eliot shares his experiences and his mistakes inside and outside of the classroom. Perhaps through the use of shared experiences, readers can better understand the challenges that Adjunct Professors face teaching at multiple schools, debating on whether or not to participate in the teacher's union, finding the time and resources to effectively manage work and personal life; as well as, trying to anticipate annual salaries when course loads are never a given to effectively achieve Affordable Healthcare. There is not just one standard to follow. Eliot Mead will be as honest as possible in his confession even if it takes him down in the process.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/198603500X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519916308&sr=1-1

Soon Be Crossing Great Waters

This is the Newest and final book of 2017: this completes the 9 books I self-published that represent over twelve years of writing.

Soon Be Crossing Great Waters

Between 2011 to 2014, the author gathered insight on the direction of global activism from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, from One Billion Rising to Femen. He reflects on inspiration from Gloria Steinem to Wangari Maathai, from Leymah Gbowee to Grace Lee Boggs, and from Julia Kristeva to Claudia Jones This is a collection of essays on Political Activism, Social Theory and Current Events. In his synopsis...Soon Be Crossing Great Waters!


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1981681973/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1513635971&sr=1-9