Counter Rhythms

Revisiting the Bernie Goetz case by David Gilfix

2011-07-29T10:42:00.017-04:00

“Is your life worth more to you than your money?” he asked me.

We were talking about muggings. I had recently moved to the Big Apple, and my friend, Harold, was responding to my comment that I would resist if someone demanded my money. Harold, a native New Yorker, took out a map of Manhattan, and ‘X’ed out the areas I should avoid for safety sake. There were many Xs. I still have that map.

Muggings were a way of life in the 1980s -- as much a part of the fabric of New York as Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Mets. Almost everyone had been mugged (at least once) or knew people who had been. In raw numbers, violent crimes had tripled in NYC since 1966, leaping from 325 to approximately 1100 per 100,000 people in 1981. I also suspect that these official statistics were low; I knew many people who had been mugged, and almost no one had even bothered reporting the incident.

But there was another strand in the daily fabric of perhaps half of all New Yorkers; I discovered it first-hand a couple of weeks later with the same friend. The two of us were perusing books in one section of a bookstore and noticed a guard watching us. When we went into another section, the guard followed. After going to a third area of the bookstore only to be followed by the same guard, we decided to leave.

Harold was Puerto Rican. He was also a Methodist minister, which should have been irrelevant unless you believed that all Puerto Ricans were dishonest except Puerto Ricans ministers. If you were black, Hispanic, or otherwise non- Caucasian in the 1980s (and perhaps even today), racial profiling was as much a fabric of your daily life in New York City as Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Mets.

Muggings and racial profiling - the two most combustible elements in New York culture - collided one day in 1984 in a subway-shooting incident that quickly made national headlines. Bernie Goetz was riding the Seventh Avenue No. 2 express train when four black youths approached him and asked for money. Goetz took out an unlicensed revolver and fired it five times at the youths, injuring all of them, and severing the spinal cord of one. Goetz later said that he felt he was being robbed. The youths claimed, initially, that they were just “panhandling.”

Everyone took sides. Big name lawyers and civil rights advocates weighed in with their perspectives.

On the day of the shooting, I got a phone call from a friend. “I just saw a man take out a gun and shoot some people on a subway,” he said. His voice sounded too calm, as if he was working hard to stay in control. I checked the radio and television news. Nothing. The story wouldn’t hit the airways for another couple of hours.

After the incident, police took statements from subway passengers and told them to expect follow-up questions soon. The Manhattan DA was deciding whether to prosecute. Curiously enough, no one had contacted my friend. “Frank,” who requested I not use his real name in this article, was born in Sierra Leone, grew up in England, and lived in America with a Green card. He was nervous about getting involved.

After a few days of coaxing, Frank’s girlfriend and I convinced him to meet with District Attorney, Greg Waples. During this meeting which I attended, Frank said that he did not see Goetz surrounded or threatened prior to the shooting.

The next day, the New York Post ran with the headlines, “Secret Witness Reopens the Goetz Case.” The Post had scooped the Times. The case would go to court.

William Kunstler, the self-described “radical lawyer”, learned about Frank and invited all of us (Frank, his girlfriend, and me) to his home office in the West Village. Kunstler was a former director of the ACLU and had gained fame defending the Chicago Seven, members of the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground, and a slew of big-name clients including Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and Martin Luther King Jr. Kunstler was to represent Darrell Cabey, the teenager whom Goetz shot and paralyzed, in a civil court trial scheduled after the main trial. He spoke with us for well over an hour and treated us all - especially Frank - like long lost friends. According to Kunstler, this was a case of blatant racism.

In contrast, Barry Slotnick defended Goetz and painted the case as a simple and justifiable response to life threatening violence.

The rest of Manhattan and it seems the entire country took sides of their own. As is always the case in such high profile events, discussions had less to do with the actual event than the perception of the issues ignited by it -- in this case, safety, and racial profiling.

Frank eventually appeared as witness for the prosecution and answered the DA’s questions as honestly as he remembered. I was a character witness and testified that Frank phoned me about the shooting long before the incident was reported on either radio or television news. In cross-examination, however, Slotnick tried to raise doubts about whether Frank was really present on the subway. Regardless, Juror Mark Lesly revealed in his book, Subway Gunman, that “Frank’s” testimony did not change his overall assessment of the incident.

Goetz was ultimately acquitted of attempted murder and assault though convicted on one comparatively minor charge: carrying an unlicensed weapon in a public place. He was sentenced to one year in prison for which he served eight months.

Eleven years later in 1996, the case went back to court in a Bronx civil trial, in which William Kunstler and Ron Kuby represented paralyzed shooting victim Darrell Cabey. This time, the jury found Goetz guilty of “reckless and deliberate infliction of emotional distress” and awarded Cabey $43M in damages. Goetz subsequently filed for bankruptcy and, according to reports, has yet to pay a dime. By the time of the civil trial, however, the public was no longer interested. Their attention had shifted from the Goetz trial of the 80s to the recently concluded OJ Simpson trial of the 90s.

So they missed the bombshell:

Daily News and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jimmy Breslin testified that Darrell Cabey had told him in an interview that the other three teenagers did intend to rob Goetz because “he looked like easy bait.” Cabey said he was not involved (of course). Following Breslin’s testimony, a New York police officer who claimed to be the first officer on the subway after the shooting, told the prosecution that shooting victim Troy Canty said, “we were going to rob him.”

For several months I questioned my own involvement in the case. Had I helped bring a man to trial who had responded no differently than many of us if put in a similar situation?

Harold had asked me whether my life was worth more to me than my money. Great question. But in the Goetz case, I believe the question many people were asking was whether a mugger’s life was worth more than the victim’s money. Let’s imagine that we knew for sure that the four youths did intend to rob Goetz as Cabey admitted. Would Goetz’s potential loss of 5 dollars have justified his response? Of course not, but the question is misleading. A mugging, by definition, is a potentially life-threatening situation. New Yorkers know too many cases of people who were stabbed or shot even after giving up their money.

A spokesman for the civil trial jury said that critical to their verdict was Goetz's act of firing a second bullet at Cabey. This, they felt, was the "deliberate infliction of emotional distress." But was it? Isn't it possible, as Goetz claimed, that he was running on adrenaline and couldn't stop while firing as quickly as possible in response to an implied threat on his life?

The jury in the bigger criminal trial could not find Goetz guilty of anything except carrying an unlicensed weapon. So why were the civil trial jurors who awarded Cabey $43M certain they had made the right decision? Simply put, they didn’t have to be. Unlike in the criminal case, civil law allows a verdict based on a “preponderance of proof,” which in the vernacular means “more likely than not.”

The problem is that nothing about the Goetz case was clear-cut.

Which brings me back to William Kunstler.

I found him brilliant, passionate, and charismatic. At the same time, the man whom I had admired for his work during the civil rights movement came across as being too sure too quickly – that the shooting was an act of racism by Goetz. It seemed to me that Kunstler had a clear agenda and was exploiting issues of ethics out of expedience.

In his post-Goetz career, Kunstler appeared to make knee-jerk ethical decisions that were as irrational as the ethics of people he so self-righteously criticized in his speeches. Kunstler defended Colin Ferguson, who was convicted of murdering six people on the Long Island Railroad (and eventually fired Kunstler to represent himself at trial). It was ironic that, after representing the victim of a subway shooting, Kunstler defended the perpetrator of an even more deadly shooting incident. He also defended Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who headed an Egyptian-based Islamist terrorist group that was implicated in bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Abdel-Rahman is now serving a life sentence for planning to set off bombs in major population centers in New York and New Jersey.

The bear hugs that Kunstler gave us were disingenuous.

The one thing about the case that was clear was my friend’s courage and honesty in coming forth and describing what he did and did not see. Here, our court systems excelled by enabling someone like Frank to communicate one perspective of the truth through a personal and untainted recollection of the incident. I am glad that Frank spoke up but suspect that, either way, the DA would have found a reason to bring this case to trial; the controversy was simply too big.

In the end, the talk show hosts, columnists, and members of the general public who were sure they knew the facts demonstrated that they were willing to formulate opinions based on ideology, which they spewed with impunity. After all, who could not be opposed to either racial profiling or mugging? The subway shooting was essentially a catalyst for people to debate which of these societal evils they most opposed, and, by inversion, which one they would prefer to ignore. If we had recognized at the time that both were deleterious to a healthy society, we would have better understood the pathology of our impulse to manipulate or obfuscate already complex issues with false labels.

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Previous Counter Rhythms article: Congratulations. You're Lucky!
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Congratulations. You're Lucky! (Some uncommon thoughts for the graduating class of 2011) by David Gilfix

2011-05-30T13:47:00.015-04:00

Graduates,

Almost everything in your life is due to luck.

Don’t throw tomatoes! I said “almost.” The itsy bitsy part not due to luck is more important than the gargantuan part that is. But you will never understand that part unless you first realize how much about you was not determined by you.

So let’s set the stage with the big picture. And I mean the really big picture. The visible universe in which we live is calculated to be a distance of about 28 billion light years across, and the actual universe might be many times greater. Our home is in a galaxy called the Milky Way, which, scientists estimate, contains about 400 billion stars. The Milky Way is one of about 500 billion galaxies; each containing approximately 300 billion stars. So do the math: Our star, Sol, is one of 150 sextillion stars (that’s 150 x 10 to the 21^st power), and our home is the only planet orbiting Sol that contains life, including yours and mine.

And we had absolutely nothing to do with it! We didn’t select earth from a big galactic travel guide of 150 sextillion stars because, for example, we wanted to live on a planet where we could hear rock-n-roll music (even though that certainly would have been a good reason).

So either we are lucky, or we are the product of a “Divine intention,” which means we are incredibly fortunate. And if you prefer to substitute the words ”fortunate” or “blessed” for “lucky” throughout this discussion, be my guest. Personally, I find your beliefs way more humble (and no less logical) than the belief that we should take credit for our situation.

Anyway, among the humans on planet earth, which orbits one of 150 sextillion stars, are you and I. Yes, we are lucky – and not simply to be living in a community that can afford indulgences like elaborate, fancy-clothed graduation ceremonies and, ahem, opinionated bloggers; we are lucky to be alive, today.

Consider this: according to scientists, Homo sapiens have existed for roughly 200,000 years. If you are lucky enough to reach the age of 80, then the span of your existence will constitute 4/10,000 (or .0004) of the life of our species on planet earth – and probably will encompass the best period, especially if you live in the United States or one of the very few relatively free, democratic countries. As a homo sapien living in the 21^st century, you have inherited a goldmine of innovations to which you contributed nothing: the light bulb, washing machines, dishwashers, toilets (don’t laugh, Ghandi wrote more about sanitation than about peace), planes, trains, automobiles, computers, internet, radios, telephones, televisions (actually, that one was a mistake), x-rays, cat scans, ultra-sound, penicillin, cell phones, violins, pianos, banjos, and greatest of all, of course, the guitar.

Still not convinced that you are lucky to be alive today, as opposed to any other part of our 99.96% of human history? Try this little experiment. The next time you have a root canal, just for fun ask your oral surgeon to do it without Novocain.

If you live in the USA then chances are you are quite “fortunate” or “blessed” or “lucky.” Consider that out of 192 member UN countries, and perhaps 15 additional non-UN countries, 67 of them are in some state of war, be it internal or external. If you lived in many of those countries, there is a good chance you would be a soldier, and in some places, such as Sudan, you might have been a child soldier. If you were brought up in a country at war, there is a good chance you could be dead (people tend to get killed in wars).

Today, out of a total 7 billion people on this planet, only 307 million, roughly 5 percent live in the United States. The US has a higher percentage of college graduates than all but 12 countries, and – sorry to be blunt with you - it isn’t because we are smarter than everyone else.

But what does all this have to do with you, today? Well, hang on. Not only did you have nothing to do with the where of your life, meaning your place in the galaxy or on planet earth, or the when of your life, meaning today, but you also had little to do with the what of your life, meaning all the skills and talents that you take pride in or admire in others.

Most of your intelligence is due to luck – you can’t control that. Same with your learning - you didn’t determine the neighborhood where you grew up or the schools or your teachers or the amount of love and stimulation you were given during those critical early years.

Speaking of which, don’t forget your first big swimming race: you versus 300 million others. How did you happen to win? Remember, you had never taken a swimming lesson in your life! But you won, everyone else died, and now you are a graduate.

Are you talented in music or math? Luck. Can you throw a baseball farther than your friends? Luck. Can you run fast? Luck. Were you born with a great singing voice? Luck.

Ah, but you say you worked hard to perfect your windup, practice your instrument, refine your voice, improve your running techniques, or develop your math skills. Hey, nice going! You’ve made some great choices to make the best out of the “what,” the raw material with which you were lucky enough to be born. But don’t forget: Most people don’t have the luxury to spend hours each day developing their particular skill – they have to work for their next meal.

Let’s move on. Your health is largely due to luck. You did nothing to deserve your health challenges or your health success. You do have a choice about how you live, and, for sure, your diet and lifestyle can reduce your risk of certain illnesses. But just in case you harbor the delusion that you are in control, try to answer this: Why is Keith Richards still alive?

The economic class in which you were raised? Luck. Your appearance – whether you are tall, short, fat, thin, symmetrical or not - is largely due to luck, and will substantially influence your chances of success. In today’s looks oriented culture, the big leadership positions often will be won by the candidate lucky enough to have the right looks over the candidate lucky enough to have the most talent. So you need to be lucky enough to have the right kind of luck.

What about your character? Did you have good role models growing up? Great parents? A safe neighborhood? Guess what? You absorbed, through your upbringing, much (but not all) of your character strengths or weaknesses, with regard to honesty, hard work, persistence, and respect for others. And you had little control over your upbringing.

OK, so by now you are probably thinking that if luck plays such a big hand in our lives – and it does – then where does “free choice” and “free will” come in?

Very simply, we have free will to determine how we will respond to our luck-filled lives; how we will treat others and how we will treat ourselves.

We have free will to choose which interests we pursue, how hard we work, and what we will contribute in our lives with the luck-filled raw material bestowed upon us. By the way, graduates, those of you who didn’t flourish in a school environment should never assume that this means you won’t flourish in a non-school environment (as Pete Seeger said, never let your schooling get in the way of your learning).

Free will, from today on, means you can choose your influences, which includes your friends and what you read, watch, or listen to.

However, you cannot choose to become an ace fastball pitcher unless you were lucky enough to be born with an ace fastball pitcher arm. But you can choose how you will respond to other people (who might or might not be ace fastball pitchers). This is even more important than whether the Yankees lose. Did I mention that, having been Boston-born lucky, the Yankees annoy me even more than people who believe they are “self-made” men?

Speaking of which, have you ever heard the classic Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way”? Great song. Great singer. Yet, the words are totally wrong. Sinatra was born with unbelievable talent. He didn’t work hard for it. In fact, Sinatra was known for working very little. He would go into the recording studio and nail the song on his first try, when other singers would take all day. And as for ‘doing it his way,’ anyone who has read anything about ol’ Frank knows that he got a lot of help.

Once you recognize how much luck plays into everything, you will hopefully withdraw from the American pastime of idolizing the rich, famous, or powerful, and disparaging those in less desirable positions.

Understanding luck, you will realize that, in contradiction to everything you might have been led to believe, people in high positions don’t have higher character than those in lower positions. Often they aren’t more qualified than the people in lower position, either.

So you can withhold judgments about others. Including yourself.

Maybe, despite what the talk-radio babblers say, the poor do need help. Remember, neither you nor Frank Sinatra are a “self-made” man; like everyone else, you are mostly a “luck-made with free will” man or woman.

Luck, or “good fortune” or “being blessed,” is humbling.

But it shouldn’t be an excuse to be lazy. Yes, the cards you were given determine much of your present and future situation. BUT YOU’VE ALREADY WON THAT GAME. You live in the United States in the year 2011. You have more freedom, more opportunities, more resources, and better technology than most people will ever have!

Don’t waste time comparing your luck with others – it misses the point. You are already amazingly lucky to be living in a time and place where you can get Novocain before you have a root canal, where you can create a career simply by working hard and showing good character, and where you can come home to watch the Red Sox smash the Yankees on a high definition TV.

So go work hard, respect everyone and disparage no one based only on their situation, and don’t be jealous or arrogant. And give back to charity way more than the norm. You did nothing to deserve all the advantages with which you were born. So share some of it with others as you take advantage of YOUR luck and help make the world a better place.

Congratulations, graduates, and may luck and good character be with you for the rest of your life.

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Latest Counter Rhythms article: Revisiting the Bernie Goetz case

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Hubris in Wisconsin by David Gilfix

2011-03-13T16:14:00.010-04:00

Little of the national debate about Wisconsin’s controversial Budget Repair Bill is really about Wisconsin, its budget, or the actual bill. Mostly, the debate has become a soundboard to reflect people’s views about unions. Critics of unions point out that unions sometimes go too far and don't always act in the public's best interest. In some cases, union contracts have disallowed non-union members to perform simple, inexpensive tasks, guaranteed raises even when they were undeserved, and made it difficult to fire underperforming workers. Fair enough. But what about corporations? Prior to unions, we had child labor, 7-day work weeks, unsafe and unhealthy work conditions, widespread discrimination, and inadequate pay for millions of people who could not battle alone for higher pay. Was the goal of the corporation ever to act in the "public's best interest"?

The simple truth is that while neither corporations nor unions are designed to act in the best interest of the public they often have the effect of acting in the public’s interest. A corporation's first allegiance is to its shareholders, and a union's first allegiance is to its members. Corporations, acting in their own best interest, have created technological innovations, medical breakthroughs, and wonderful products that have improved and transformed our quality of life and increased our leisure time. Unions, acting in their own best interest, have improved the working conditions, wages, and safety standards of millions of people, protected minorities from discrimination, and helped create the middle class, to which most of us belong.

People who criticize teachers and police unions because they advocate for their members’ benefits (rather than the good of the public) are correct to a point, but miss a bigger, more basic, tenet about capitalism: by working towards and advancing their own best interest, whether it be a corporation or a union, everyone often benefits. Without profit as a motivation, why would corporations take financial risks to create innovative products? Similarly, without the improvements in wages and working conditions brought on by unions, what would influence qualified candidates to enter the fields of teaching and law enforcement, about which we claim to care so much?

It is true that unions sometimes go too far, but to blame our financial crises mostly on out-of-control unions, while ignoring the consequences to our financial situation of two expensive wars and fraud and waste committed by out-of-control corporations is folly. Good morning, America! While some of us were sleeping, there was an epidemic of banking scandals brought about partly by unsound and sometimes fraudulent investment schemes, misleading and sometimes dishonest marketing campaigns, inaccurate and incompetent accounting practices and credit ratings, and an avaricious corporate culture that awarded huge payouts to the same members who presided over the personal investments through which Americans went broke.

Which brings us to Wisconsin.

On March 9, Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin voted to strip unions of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Republican Governor Scott Walker released a written statement that said, "I applaud all members of the Assembly for showing up, debating the legislation, and participating in democracy. Their action will save jobs, protect taxpayers, reform government, and help balance the budget."

Governor Walker believes that unions are partly responsible for Wisconsin’s budget challenges. Therefore, he has determined that the solution should involve removing unions from the budgetary process, rather than seriously responding to other causes, such as poor investments, corporate tax breaks that withdrew money from the system, poor fiscal planning and accounting, inadequate taxation, or the national and international economic downturn. Inspired by Walker’s leadership, Republican senators decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to vote against the rights of employees to assemble and vote in their best interests.

However, by supporting legislation that stripped people of the right to exert their influence through negotiations, Governor Walker has advocated against a democratic system of checks and balances between employers and unions. This, in turn, means that he and the Republican lawmakers who supported the bill don’t believe we need such a system. Moreover, it suggests that they are unaware that the history of USA labor relations is a long exercise of give and take, push and pull, between employers and employees, marked by setbacks and huge gains for both sides.

Rather than acknowledge this history, Governor Walker and the Republican lawmakers have chosen to focus exclusively on the abuses of unions while ignoring their benefits, and on the benefits of corporate and state employers while ignoring their abuses. Could they be myopic? Ideologues?

There is another possibility. They could be so sure that they know the causes and remedy for the State’s fiscal problems that they believe listening to opposing opinions is a waste of time. Better to dictate their solution without negotiating with unions that don’t have the public’s best interest at heart (unlike them), than to negotiate and risk a compromise.

But this brings us to a puzzle: How could a governor and lawmakers, who should understand the complexities of the financial challenges and fallibility of economic forecasts, be so sure they have the correct solutions? So convinced of their prescience, in fact, that they would vote to disallow negotiations from large groups of employees who might disagree.

There is only one answer. Hubris.

Life in the age of Pretend by David Gilfix

2011-01-23T11:07:00.010-05:00

This article was published in The Boston Herald, and has been revised.

To misquote former President Clinton, it all depends on what your definition of pretend is. But let’s not quibble! For this discussion, pretend includes activities done vicariously, indirectly, or via -outsourcing that we pretended to have actually done ourselves.

It’s a super age for the great pretenders.

Over 500 million people (including me) pretend to visit people on Facebook, where we each have, on average, 130 pretend friends (do you know anyone who really has that many?). Of course, Facebook, itself, is fundamentally pretend. First, it is not a book, and second, you never “face” your friends - its whole purpose is to encourage non face-to-face social encounters that we have conveniently coined as “virtual”. But old-fashioned concepts of friendship matter little in new-fashioned playgrounds like Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was just chosen as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year”, which means that all his pretend Facebook friends can send him pretend roses.

Like Facebook, text messaging has essentially replaced traditional phone calls as a more convenient but pretend form of speaking. Messaging is now so popular that it is standard practice for high school students to pretend to talk to each other while texting other ‘friends’. (If u dont get y then u r 2 old). Similarly, according to Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, 175 million Tweeters now send and anxiously await these virtual status updates of 140 characters or fewer that we pretend to be newsworthy.

On the home front, 63 percent of parents keep their televisions on while pretending to pay attention to their children at family dinners. We all spend more time watching TV - three hours per day to see actors pretend to be real characters -- than we spend paying attention to each other or engaging in real activities. Toys like Guitar Hero ‘empower’ kids to play pretend guitar rather than learn a real one. 36 million units of Nintendo’s Wii in US circulation allow kids to pretend to play outdoor games like tennis without actually going outside, playing tennis, or being with anyone.

But virtual living might be preferable to the self-deceptions of actual living. In this Age of Pretend, we are engaged in a lively, sometimes heated national debate about how to improve our children’s education. This while we approve school budget cuts in town after town, and at the same buy record amounts of iPods, iPads, cell phones, laptops, Wiis, DSes, Xboxes, and high definition TVs -- enabling the next generation of decision makers to stare at screens for an average of seven mind-numbing hours per day rather than interacting with the real world.

Meanwhile, as we eagerly embrace our new separate-but-together-online life style, we seem to outsource more of our off-screen tasks like home repairs, painting, and gardening, and we find less time for really getting together with friends and family.

Of course, none of these pretend trends began yesterday; they took many years to develop. It might be impossible, but for a minute let's just pretend we can cure this epidemic. What then would we actually do?

Some of my favorite guitarists by David Gilfix

2010-12-19T13:56:00.146-05:00

Besides the computer and the wheel, the invention that has most benefited society is quite possibly the guitar. And before you start accusing me of hyperbole, stop and imagine what the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin would have sounded like if they all played the accordion. Or think of Jimi Hendrix performing Purple Haze on the recorder. Choosing a single favorite guitarist is a little like choosing your favorite pastry at Dalloyou’s in Paris. Impossible! The best I can do is to discuss a few of my many favorites.

Charlie Christian (Texas, 1916 – 1942)

The first great electric guitarist, Charlie Christian championed a fluid, single-line swing style that influenced almost every major jazz guitarist that came after him including Barney Kessel, Les Paul, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow, and George Benson. Christian tried to model his solos on the sound of jazz saxophonists from his era, yet his own harmonic vocabulary was more sophisticated and influenced the later bop players.

Born in Texas in 1916 and raised in Oklahoma City, Christian was discovered by the great record producer and talent scout, John Hammond (who also discovered Billy Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan). Hammond introduced Christian to Bennie Goodman with whom he played from 1939 to 1941, wrote many of the band’s arrangements, and became a star performer. It was here that he popularized the new electric guitar.

SWING TO BOP (1941) by Charlie Christian :

In Christian’s recordings, what stands out is how perfectly his solos enhance the music. His musical conceptions are doubly impressive since he accomplished everything at very young age. Sadly, Christian died of tuberculosis in his prime at 25.

Pepe Romero (Malaga, Spain)

I challenge anyone to find another guitarist of any style who is technically better than classical guitarist Pepe Romero. His colorful interpretive skills are equally noteworthy -- always stylistically correct, never showboating (even though he could out showboat anyone).

Born in Malaga, Spain in 1944, Pepe Romero only had one guitar teacher in his life – his father, composer/guitarist, Celedonio Romero. He has performed both classical and flamenco guitar since the age of seven. Additionally, along with his father and brothers, Celin and Angel, Pepe has performed in the renowned Los Romeros Guitar Quartet, given solo concerts, and premiered works by major composers Rodrigo, Torroba, Palamo, and Romero senior.

Pepe Romero - Fantasia, by Celedonio Romero

I liken Pepe Romero to a great athlete such as Michael Jordan. For us mortal guitarists, Pepe Romero makes the impossible appear downright easy -- blinding speed, gorgeous tone, and flawless left-hand technique, all masterfully combined to bring out the highest levels of art.

Arthiel Lane “Doc” Watson (North Carolina)

For old-time folk and bluegrass music, it’s hard to find a guitarist who does better finger-, flat-, or cross picking. In case you’re not a guitarist (remember that it’s never too late), cross picking involves rolling the pick evenly across three adjacent strings over and over as you change the notes in the left hand, thereby creating a banjo rhythm triplets-inside-the-bar effect in which the important melody notes keep falling on different beats.

If that sounds too technical, here’s another way of thinking about Doc Watson. Imagine sitting on a porch on a hot summer day, drinking beer, wearing a straw hat, feet propped up, and the person across from you is playing old time folk music with the sweetest, smoothest, guitar playing you could imagine.

Doc Watson - Black Mountain Rag

Doc Watson sounds like the guitarist for whom the acoustic flat top guitar was invented, and he is considered by many as a guitarist who has exerted a huge influence on acoustic guitar lead playing in folk and bluegrass music.

Michael Dadap (Southern Leyte, Philippines)

The first time I heard Michael Dadap in concert, he performed a piece I had heard more than some “top 40” hits – Villa Lobos’s Prelude in E minor; and he made it sound brand new. It was like listening to Ray Charles singing America. I asked Michael for lessons, and after several years under his tutelage, we became good friends.

Michael sounds different than other classical guitarists perhaps because he perceives the music differently, perhaps because his background is so unique: award-winning composer; folk performer in a touring Filipino ensemble; jazz guitarist who survived music school by playing gigs; founding music director of the Iskwelahang Rondalla (Rondalla School) of Boston, Massachusetts; and conductor and co-director, along with his violinist wife, Dr. Yeou-Cheng Ma, of New York’s renowned Children’s Orchestra Society.

Both as soloist and part of the Dadap-Ma guitar/violin duo, Michael’s music seems to come alive with fresh ideas where others have grown stale. Here are two Filipino folk songs arranged and performed by Michael Dadap, accompanied by the paintings of Fernando Amorsolo:

Filipino Love Songs by Michael Dadap

Michael has received numerous awards, including the (borough of) Queens Musician of the Year, and the Pamanang Lahi (lifetime achievement) Award from Philippine President, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Steve Morse (Michigan)

The worst thing I can say about him is that he is a Guitar Hero. But whose fault is that, anyway? He’s good - really good. Morse is a fusion player who combines funk, jazz, classical, country, and rock to create his own individual sound. Morse grabs you with an arsenal of rhythms, creative chord choices, and lead lines that range from smooth and songlike, to sharp and edgy.

Morse first drew a following in the 1970s with his University of Miami group, The Dixie Dregs. While the Dixie Dregs never achieved huge commercial success, the progressive nature, sheer sophistication, and expert musicianship of the band drew a loyal following and juggernauted Morse as a top guitarist among fellow instrumentalists. Morse has been nominated for six Grammy awards and is a five-time winner of Guitar Magazine readers’ Best Overall Guitarist (only Steve Howe of Yes has won as many times). In the 1980s, Morse created his own Steve Morse Band. Later, he joined Kansas and, in 1993, Deep Purple.

Like most rock musicians, the lights, glitter, and costumes in Steve Morse’s performances are part of the package that attracts people. Despite that one shortcoming, Morse is one of today’s most interesting and exciting guitarists.

Steve Morse - 8 1/2 Minute Unnamed Solo

Carlos Santana (Jalisco, Mexico)

Long before Paul Simon brought international music to the pop world through his groundbreaking Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints albums, Mexican-born Carlos Santana introduced an entire generation of British and American rock listeners to timbales, congas, as well as Latin and African rhythms.

Santana’s Latin/Afro music is made as an insider, as someone who breathes these sounds as part of his own culture and then incorporates them into popular music styles. He has collaborated with a who’s who of musicians, including Dave Mathews, Angelique Kidjo, Herbie Hancock, Eric Clapton, Dave Mathew, Shakira, Jose Feliciano, Gloria Estafan, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Bob Dylan. Moreover, Santana is fanatic about choosing top drummers, and his own Carlos Santana Band is widely recognized for having one of the best percussion sections in the business.

Carlos Santana- EUROPA

Santana was ranked 15^th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Times. His technique is superb, and he combines it with passion and an authentically personal style. He is able to mix blues and rock with Latin and African styles to create a completely individual sound that grabs you instantly from the moment you sip your first Corona with lime.

Jeff Beck (Wallington, England)

Jeff Beck gained stardom by playing in the Yardbirds. He joined them in 1965, two days after Eric Clapton left the group. Playing alongside Jimmy Page, they comprised probably the greatest guitar duo in rock history. The Yardbirds are often cited as pioneers in the (then) new rock sounds of distortion and feedback, which is true but misses the bigger point: their greatest contribution was as pioneers of an original, technically challenging, exciting, and innovative rock and blues guitar style. Clapton and Page also belong on my all-time favorites list, but there is only room here for one former Yardbird guitarist.

Since leaving the Yardbirds, Beck has performed and recorded blues-rock, heavy metal, and jazz-rock both in his own self-named groups and in collaboration with many top artists including Sting, Phil Collins, Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Cindi Lauper, ZZ Top, and Les Paul. His work has earned him numerous awards, including five Grammies for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

Beck has a unique, thumb picking style that includes creative use of feedback and distortion, and an uncommon skill on the vibrato bar and the volume knob – the later is often turned up after the initial attack on the string, creating a “spacey,” ethereal non-guitar-plucking sound.

Jeff Beck - A Day in the Life, by Lennon and McCartney:

However, what stands out in Becks music is his overall conception, which is always architecturally sound, yet personal, individual, and powerful enough to deliver a one-two punch to the gut and heart.

Honorable Mention: Roy Clark (Meherrin, Virginia)

Roy Clark is as corny as Kansas in August, and he could care less; he’s having too much fun playing rings around everyone else.

The star of television’s long running Hee-Haw was a two-time National Banjo Contest winner before the age of fifteen. He plays drop-dead country fiddle and many styles of guitar including country (of course), jazz and flamenco, sings, and has even won the Country Music Comedy award for his between-song patter. Listening to Roy Clark play, one gets the impression that it is as easy for him as tying his shoes.

Roy Clark isn’t particularly innovative, he hasn’t written great songs, and he certainly hasn’t influenced many musicians with his music. But he still deserves to be on this list for one simple reason: he’s fun! There are many great musicians who can pour out their pain for us, but few can match Roy Clark in sharing a good ol,’ “aw shucks! Who cares if I’m corny?” approach to playing.

Roy Clark - Black Sapphire / (Fingers on Fire)
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Who are some of your favorite guitarists?

Can you solve Papa's puzzles? by David Gilfix

2010-08-23T15:46:00.015-04:00

The greatest treasure my grandfather left us was his letters, capturing his thoughts, interests, passions, opinions, insights, and grandfatherly wisdom gained over his lifetime.   They also included many, many math and logic puzzles which he had collected or made up and delighted in sharing.

From 1976 to about 1982, Papa, as all the grandchildren referred to him, wrote weekly letters that he then photocopied at a local library and sent individually to his two daughters and all the members of his extended family. I saved most of his letters in cardboard shoeboxes, but inevitably many were lost. Fortunately, my mother and Aunt have since recovered, organized, and retyped all the handwritten letters, and with the help of my jack-of-all-trades cousin, they will soon self-publish these letters as a 350-page book for family members here and abroad. The letters capture the essence of a remarkable man, and the book will surely be passed down to my children, and someday from them to theirs.

Papa came from a respected Orthodox family in London. His father, born in Mogilev in Eastern Belarus,was a Torah scholar who served as the Rosh Hashochetim (head trainer, inspector, and Kabbala [license] provider for kosher meat production) for all of England and Ireland. Rav Kook, then chief rabbi in Palestine and one of the great Torah scholars of his time, wrote a glowing endorsement of my great-grandfather which might have helped him secure his position.

Papa left England as a young man, worked at a Hebrew Orphanage, taught math at Temple University, and later became an actuary. If you own a variable annuity or universal life insurance policy, then you have my grandfather to thank (or blame), because he pioneered the development of both.   In his obituary, the Council of Actuaries credited him with developing the concept of a flexible life insurance plan that was eventually marketed as universal life. Additionally, he published the first actuarial paper on the variable annuity. Above all, Papa was a philosopher, a man who loved to share his mastery of logic and reasoning through clever puzzles and thought-provoking essays.

In another column, I will share snippets of Papa’s thoughts about a range of ethical and philosophical issues. For now, here are six of his countless math and logic puzzles which he shared with his extended family for them to ponder in their spare time.   Papa invented some of these puzzles, and found others in puzzle books. Incidentally, most of them can be solved with basic arithmetic skills, which doesn't mean that all of them are easy (at least not for me).

If you enjoy puzzles I invite you to try to solve at least one of them! If you want to post an answer or explanation, please refer to the puzzle by number.
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Puzzle 1 – HOW LONG IS THE SHELF

A shelf is exactly filled with books of equal thickness.

If the books were 1” thinner, the shelf would accommodate 6 more books.

If the books were 1” thicker, then there would be no room for 3 books.

How many inches long is the shelf?
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Puzzle 2 – HOW OLD ARE BERT'S CHILDREN?

Bill is the Insurance Agent. Bert is the prospect for Insurance.

Bill:    So you are just 40 – with three kids. How old are they?
Bert:   Figure it out for yourself. The three ages add up to the street
          number of this house. If you multiply their ages together, the
          result will be my age.
Bill:    I still can’t tell their ages.
Bert:   Forget it then. The two elder kids will be walking back from
           school now; so you will meet them.
Bill:    That’s all I need to know.

Bill then gave the three ages without delay.

What are the three ages?
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Puzzle 3: HANGED OR DROWNED?

A man has committed a crime punishable by death.
He is to make a statement.
If the statement is true, he is to be drowned.
If the statement is false, he is to be hanged.

What statement did he make to confound his executioners?
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Puzzle 4: STRAIGHTFORWARD MATH?

What number leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, respectively, but leaves no remainder when divided by 11?
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Puzzle 5: MEASURING THE BOOKWORM

On January 1, I started to read a book and by reading the same number of pages each day of the month, I managed to finish it on the 31st of January (include the 31st).

If I had started by reading a quarter of that number of pages on January 1, and on each succeeding day, one page more than on the preceding day, I should also have finished it on January 31 (include the 31st).

How many pages did the book contain?
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Puzzle 6: WHO DONE IT?

Four men were eating dinner in a restaurant when one of them suddenly struggled to his feet, cried out: “I’VE BEEN POISONED” and fell dead.

His companions were arrested on the spot and under questioning made the following statements, exactly one of which is false in each case.

WATTS: I didn’t do it
                 I was sitting next to O’NEIL.
                 We had our usual WAITER today.

ROGERS: I was sitting across the table from SMITH.
                We had a new WAITER today.
                The WAITER didn’t do it.

O’NEIL: ROGERS didn’t do it.
                It was the WAITER who poisoned SMITH.
                WATTS lied when he said we had our usual WAITER today.

Assuming that only SMITH’s companions and the WAITER are implicated, WHO WAS THE MURDERER?

Can your managed mutual funds beat my index funds? by David Gilfix

2010-08-05T19:36:00.009-04:00

I know enough about finance to know that I don’t know enough about finance.

So last spring, I attended a financial fair for teachers to learn more. I spoke to three financial experts representing different financial firms, and I asked each of them the same question: can your managed mutual funds beat my index funds?

Did I mention that I don’t trust experts?

So what was I supposed to conclude when all three experts agreed that (of course!) their managed funds could beat index funds? I concluded that the situation needed the perspective of a non-expert like me to analyze the issue with whatever grey matter was left between my ears after years of trying to understand the stock market.

Here’s what the experts said, followed by my “grey matter” analysis:

1. Financial experts: Managed funds can beat index funds because the experts thoroughly research each company stock they buy or sell and then sell off stocks of companies that won't perform well in the future.

The ol’ grey matter: Yes, index funds have to keep all companies that fit the requisite profile of their particular index; and yes, managed funds can sell off poorly performing stock or stocks that appear to be in trouble, which seems like a slam-dunk advantage for the managed mutual fund companies.

Except for one problem: In order to sell stock you need a buyer. But who buys these shares of a company from an expert mutual fund manager (supported in the selling decision by expert financial analysts)? Since mutual funds buy and sell huge lots of stock, usually the buyers of these blocks are other big investment institution (including other mutual funds), advised by other expert financial analysts! In other words, there have to be experts who believe a company is a good buy, at a given price, at the same time that there are experts who believe the company is a good sell, at, by golly, the same price. Yet, only one of them can be correct, which means that half of them will be wrong. So why should I trust one expert mutual fund manager over any other expert investor?

Which is exactly what I asked the three financial experts, and they all answered in the same way. Ready?

2. Financial experts: Only the best-managed funds can beat the indexes. To find them, it is critical to examine the track record of the fund and the fund manager. Additionally, it is wise to consider the fund recommendations of top independent financial journals. (All three experts at the fair claimed to use funds that had beaten the indexes and were recommended in financial newsletters).

The ol’ grey matter: OK, this seems to make sense. But wait! How reliable is either past performance or recommendations from journals as a predictor of mutual fund success?

Here, I must confess, these financial experts were completely correct. Past performance is indeed a good indicator of future performance: good past performance is a strong indicator of bad future performance! Consider:

A study of 144 equity portfolios from 1975 to 1989, by Barksdale and Green, revealed that the funds which were in the top quintile over a 5-year period were the least likely to finish in the top fifty percent over the next 5 year period, as reported by Larimore, Lindnauer, and Beboeuf in the book, Bogleheads.

Other information provide by Bogleheads include this: Since the 1960s, the average return of the top 20 managed mutual funds in each decade was below the market indexes for the next decade.

And this: Not a single one of the top 50 performing mutual funds in 2000 were among the top 50 performing mutual funds in 1999 or 1998.

OK, so much for relying on past performance, but what about the recommendations from professionals who study mutual funds full-time?

John Graham and Cahill Harvey, professors at the University of Utah and Duke University, respectively, studied 237 newsletters and concluded that there was no evidence they could time the market. Mark Hubert, founder of Hulbert Financial Digest, which tracks the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters, ran an interesting experiment: What would happen if he constructed a hypothetical mutual fund model for each year, based on the top performing mutual fund portfolio of all financial newsletters for the previous year? Answer: after 18 years, the return on this portfolio would be, on average, “30 percentage points per year below what you could have achieved simply by buying and holding the stock market itself (as judged by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index),” as reported in The Wall Street Journal.

So if the full-time expert analysts writing the expensive financial newsletters can’t pick a portfolio of managed mutual funds that can beat the market, why would I trust financial advisors/brokers to do any better?

A different financial advisor answered simply that if I am comfortable with the returns I am getting in index funds, then I should stick with them – a comment that made total sense, until I realized it was a great sales tactic. Of course I’m not “comfortable” with recent returns! Is anyone? The question is whether I would be any more comfortable with managed funds. Probably not.

The hard truth, as reported by Mark Buek on research by Bankrate, is that index funds have way outperformed managed funds over most “rolling” 5-year periods. For example, during the 5-year period ending in 2008:

The S&P 500 outperformed 72 percent of its active large-cap competitors;

The S&P 400 MidCap index beat 79 percent of active mid-cap funds; and

The S&P SmallCap 600 beat nearly 86 percent of active small-cap funds.

During most 10 periods, the index funds outperformed managed funds by an even greater margin. For example, Lee McGowan, writing for About.com Guide, says that according to Vanguard, during the 10-year period ending in 2007:

84% of managed U.S. large blend funds underperformed their index; and

95% of managed bond funds underperformed their indexes.

Let’s get back to the financial fair I attended last spring. The way I see it, when you choose managed mutual funds (rather than index funds), you are choosing to trust a chain of experts: The expert advisor who helps you choose the funds, the expert analysts in the financial newsletters who inform the advisor, and the expert mutual fund manager who will attempt to outperform the indexes.

Did I mention that I don’t trust experts?

5 Steps to Better Education in America (and why all of them will be rejected) by David Gilfix

2010-07-18T15:14:00.010-04:00

For those who want more information, notes are provided after the main article.

Most approaches to our educational challenges are fads supported by opinions that are confused for studies. The fads – like “No Child Left Behind” – shift with the wind; sometimes even former supporters admit that their programs were flawed.   My 5 Steps to Better Education are different: they are definitely not fads, they are supported by common sense and experience, and they will all be rejected.

1. Smaller classes
The easiest and simplest way to guarantee more learning in school is to have small classes. In fact, it is a no-brainer – an ironic term given the topic. When there are fewer students there is more teacher time per student. When there is more teacher time per student, the students are better engaged, which means fewer behavioral challenges, which means less down time and more participating in exciting projects, which means the students have more fun and learn more.

However, smaller classes are a pipe dream: they require more teachers which require more money, and there’s that new high definition television that most people would prefer to buy.

2. Enrichment for bright and gifted students in the elementary schools
Students on special education plans (SPED) get extra services, as they should. Bright and gifted students get few special services and are placed in inclusive classrooms with less advanced students, where their learning speed is compromised in order not to leave other students too far behind.   Particularly in the elementary schools where there are few advanced courses, bright-but-bored students sometimes flounder and can end up in home or private school.

However, inclusive learning, through which students develop important social skills, should not be eliminated. Rather, there needs to be a balance between inclusive activities for social development, and abilities-based learning for academic development.

Unfortunately, expanding enrichment programs is a pipe dream: the prevailing sentiment is that bright and gifted students do fine as things are.   Further, enrichment programs require money, and there’s that new high definition television that most people would prefer to buy.

3. Bring back shop classes.
How society defines education is at least as important as how well society implements it. Today schools emphasize book learning almost exclusively, as if no other pursuit requires planning, analyzing, prioritizing and creating.   Yet, as many a mechanically challenged college professor knows, intelligence comes in different flavors. There are many mechanically gifted students who will not become college professors, yet could flourish in school, and later professionally, if their particular skills were valued.

Sadly, our present academic model seems to cultivate managers over builders. Is it possible that, without the builders, eventually there will be nothing to manage?

Alas, implementing more shop classes is a pipe dream: it requires more teachers and more equipment, which requires more money, and there’s that new high definition television that most people would prefer to buy. Besides, everyone knows that book learning is more important.

4. More time in traditional parenting during the early years
Many people blame students’ learning issues on inadequate teaching and curriculum, and therefore assume the remedy is to improve teaching and curriculum – which is an example of using one assumption (the cause) to support another assumption (the fix, in case you are taking notes). In fact, most students on Individual Education Plans (“IEP”s) were diagnosed with learning challenges early, often in kindergarten and first grade, well before they could have been damaged by inadequate teaching.   These children began their school career behind, and this suggests that neither teaching nor curriculum is the cause of their learning issues.

So what is? Only two possibilities: nature or nurture (or both). All students are born with certain talents and learning challenges and often both are evident at an early age. At the same time, all students benefit from early parenting, and we should seriously question whether any daycare worker in charge of 5-to-10 toddlers or infants can match a good parent in providing the love and one-to-one attention that best promotes learning and behavioral development during a child’s important formative years.

Unfortunately, any hope of increasing parenting time is a pipe dream. Many parents have no choice and must work to make ends meet. As for the rest of us, is it possible that we have bought-in to a fad (backed by opinions that are mistaken for studies) because it conveniently fits with our two-working-parent lifestyle: that quantity of parenting is superfluous to learning and behavioral development during the most critical period in a child’s life?

Besides, how else can we pay for all those new high definition televisions?

5. Turn off the television and computer screens
Like Step 4, this topic can only be approached after an honest discussion about the nature of learning, cognitive development, and behavioral development. If real learning takes place only at school in a classroom in front of a teacher then it is superfluous whether a child spends most of his critical early years one-on-one with a loving, attentive, devoted parent or one-on-10 with a day care worker; and it is superfluous whether the child spends most of her time singing, dancing, climbing, talking, asking questions, listening to stories from a real live adult and playing with sand, clay, paint, blocks, puzzles or whether she spend most of her time staring at a television or computer.

Most children spend most of their time staring at a screen.

According to Kaiser Family Foundation research, average television viewing among all ages in childhood is 3 hours per day, which means that children spend more time, annually, watching television than in school (1095 hours on television, 1080 hours in school – assuming no days absent). Further, average overall time in front of a screen (such as TV, computer, WII, Nintendo DS, or Cell Phone) for children age 8-18, according to a 2010 study, is 7½ hours per day.

Indeed, numerous academic and medical studies suggest a strong correlation between excessive time in front of a screen and a host of cognitive behavioral issues, even at an early age, including these: Aggressive behavior, memory issues, delayed literacy, issues of focus and attention including ADHD, sleep problems, vitamin D deficiency (from staying inside), and obesity.

Unfortunately, any possibility that children will spend less time in front of a screen is a pipe dream. Children love screens, which makes lots of parents happy because it keeps them occupied and costs less than a baby sitter.   Further, most children have a persuasive screen-viewing role model - their own parents.

And there is no way we are going to stop watching our high definition televisions!

Conclusion
Parents, politicians, and so-called educational experts will consider none of these 5 steps seriously.   Instead, in their quest for better education in America they will continue to focus almost exclusively on teachers and curriculum, and they will achieve only marginal results.

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Thank you for reading "5 Steps to Better Education in America (and why all of them will be rejected)." The notes below provide a little more information about each of the 5 steps. However, if you are really busy, stop reading here - none of these steps will be implemented anyway! (To make a comment, scroll to the bottom)

1 About smaller class size: Tennessee's Project STAR, 1985 to 1989, conducted in 79 elementary classrooms. This is considered the only large-scale, controlled study of the effects of reduced class size. Conclusions: Teachers of small classes spent significantly more time on task and significantly less time on discipline or organizational matters compared with teachers of regular-size classes. Moreover, Project Star provided “compelling evidence that small classes in the primary grades are academically superior to regular-size classes. The findings were confirmed for every school subject tested.” http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/ClassSize/academic.html

2 About enrichment for bright students: A 2006 St. Petersburg Times (Florida) poll indicated that more than half of the teachers believed that bright students in their classes were being shortchanged because they had to focus more on lower-performing students.
   A Fordham Institute Study concludes that the No Child Left Behind act has provided no benefits to the top 10 percent of students, according to the St. Petersburg Times (Florida). Commenting on the study, Fordham president Chester E. Finn Jr. said, …"In a time of fierce international competition, can we afford to let the strongest languish?"

3 About bringing back shop classes: Educators love to quote Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences, but the reality is that the No Child Left Behind fad has led to an educational approach that is antithetical to multiple intelligence learning; school systems have emphasized students' testing success above all other areas of learning, including music, art, and shop. For an excellent book about the influence of No Child Left Behind, I recommend, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” by Diane Ravitch.

4 About parenting: In private discussion, some friends who sent their children to full-time daycare or full-time before-school/after-school programs have protested my assertion that the amount of parenting time should have any affect on children’s learning or behavior. They point out that their own children are smart and well behaved, which is often true but beside the point (many people who smoke never develop health problems).
     My point is this: if parents have no effect on children’s cognitive and behavioral development, then why do we believe the opposite about teachers or day care workers? Why do we assume that everything a daycare worker is supposed to accomplish with 5 to 10 children, or a teacher with 25 children, parents are less capable of doing with 1 child who they love? Logically, it doesn’t make sense, and sadly, as more children spend more of their critical formative time with daycare workers instead of parents, kindergarten teachers are noticing way more behavioral and cognitive issues among incoming students.

5 About staring at television and other screens: Two previous Counter Rhythm articles offer in-depth, but personal, discussions about television and screens: Old Yeller and the Rabbi (and the television), and Smart Boards and Smart Students.
     In a recent article in the NY Times, Randall Stross discusses the influence of computers and television on students' education: Stross asserts that economists, using widely different methods, have made similar conclusions - that home computers in low-income households not only provided “little or no educational benefit,” but often had a negative effect. Ross provides the following examples:

Oter Malamud, assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago says that a program in Romania in which the government helped low-income families in Romania purchase computers produced a “negative effect on academic achievement.”
Duke University professors Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd report on the effects on middle school students of introducing broadband services in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005: Lower math scores initially, and then “significantly lower reading scores when the number of broadband providers passed four.”
A four-year “technology immersion” experiment in Texas, in which federal money provided laptops to students in 21 middle schools, showed “mixed results,” and students who received the laptops actually produced lower scores for writing than students in the control group.

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Note: This is the third in a three-part series on education:
Part 1, Let's fire the teachers
Part 2, Diane Ravitch can see clearly now. Can we?

The Remarkable, Emotional Flotilla Incident by David Gilfix

2010-06-06T17:03:00.016-04:00

The most remarkable part of the recent Flotilla incident is how quickly it took world opinion to place blame on Israel. Within minutes after the news story was released, the condemnations began, with almost everyone regurgitating their version of the same story:

Evil Israel attacks the peace-loving, humanitarian human-rights workers as they courageously attempt to break the embargo of Gaza in order to relieve the suffering of its poor citizens.

The problem is that almost everything in the story’s spin was debatable:

The Flotilla was not a human rights operation. That misperception arose perhaps because the name of one of the major sponsors of the Flotilla was the IHH, the Turkish based “Foundation for Human Rights.” If the journalists and politicians who gulped down the spin had done their job, they would have discovered that the name was a façade. According to former French investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the IHH had “clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad.” In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Bruguiere said that the IHH was critical to helping Al-Qaida when bin Laden wanted to target U.S. soil. The Flotilla even refused a request by the parents of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit to deliver to him the first letter he would have received in four years.

People nostalgic for 1960s era images of Kumbaya-singing civil rights workers resisting arrests in order to integrate department stores couldn’t have found a movement less similar. In fact, far from singing Kumbaya, a recent Youtube video shows Flotilla members singing a traditional terrorists' battle song about killing Jews right before embarking on their expedition.

Nor was the Flotilla’s mission “peace loving.” Consider that Gaza is in a state of War with Israel. It is run by Hamas, whose charter advocates for the violent overthrow of Israel. Hamas, which is on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, has refused offers of peace, and has fired over 4,000 rockets into Israel. Given Gaza’s declared objective and history of firing rockets and supporting terrorists, Israel imposed an embargo to prevent Gaza from receiving more weapons. By attempting to break the embargo, the Flotilla activists were essentially campaigning to help Gaza secure more weapons with which to kill Israelis.

If these activists were truly interested in peace and justice, then they could have concentrated their efforts on pressuring Hamas to renounce terrorism and accept peace with Israel, which would have effectively ended the embargo.

Nor was the goal of the Flotilla to provide food for the supposedly “suffering” Gaza citizens. That goal could have been accomplished more easily by sending food shipments directly to Israel proper where they would have been first searched for weapons and then distributed via the huge convoys of trucks which carry provisions into Gaza every day.

If the Flotilla activists really wanted to relieve the discomfort of Gaza citizens, they would have confronted Gaza citizens with the hard truth: that the price Gaza pays for working towards Israel's destruction rather than its own development is its faltering economy and the embargo.

Nor is it likely that Israeli commandos attacked the Flotilla. Consider that five of the ships followed Israel’s instructions to dock in the Israeli port city of Ashdod without incident. Israel carefully examined the contents of the supplies and, as promised, they then transported those supplies to Gaza. The sixth ship, the Mavi Marmara, was different. According to Israeli accounts, passengers yielding clubs, bats, knives, guns, and stun guns savagely attacked Israeli commandos who descended by rope via helicopter. What did the Israeli commandos bring with them? Paint guns. Their goal was to secure control of the ship without violence; the guns were merely for show.

Are the Israeli accounts credible? Shortly after the incident, network news stations broadcasted fuzzy videos of the fighting and allowed both Flotilla and Israeli spokesmen to provide their interpretations. Since then, Israel has released a new video taken from an Israeli boat that was racing to provide backup to its beleaguered soldiers, and there can be no doubt that the Israelis were attacked by the so-called peace-loving humanitarians, not the other way around.

The video shows a brutal attack on the arriving Israeli soldiers. It is notable that not a single soldier is seen drawing a weapon – not even a knife. Claiming that they saw their comrades being attacked, as we see in the videos, the backup soldiers did draw real weapons in their defense, what any soldier in any army would do.

Unfortunately, none of this makes any difference to world opinion. The Flotilla incident involved a vicious battle on a ship, but it was also an emotional battle for world opinion - one that Israel lost because people preferred spin to substance and quick judgments over careful analysis. As the Flotilla organizers must have known, once you win the emotional battle, everything else becomes irrelevant. The public outcry and animus against Israel cannot be wiped away with another, “oops, sorry,” from the journalists and politicians who discover their mistakes after fueling the outrage. Emotions are like bones: if you break one you can’t unbreak it afterwards.

The reality is that world opinion would prefer that Israelis not defend themselves. World opinion would prefer to blame Israel for an embargo than to pressure Hamas to abandon their tactic of jettisoning 4,000 rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza or their fundamental goal of destroying Israel through violent attacks. Given the extreme bias of world opinion, reflected by a United Nations that has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than all other 191 countries combined, none of this should be surprising. But in the 21st century, it is still remarkable that our expectations for Israeli are devoid of historical precedence.
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For a related Counter Rhythms article, please read What Really Happened in Gaza?

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Additional Videos
Censored Footage from the Gaza Flotilla - How Violence Breaks Out

Related article
Speech about the left, the media, and Israel by Pilar Rahola, Spanish politician, journalist and human rights activist

Diane Ravitch can see clearly now. Can we? by David Gilfix

2010-03-28T12:58:00.061-04:00

The big news in the world of education reform is the stunning reversal in ideology of Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under President George W. Bush and one of the biggest supporters of the No Child Left Behind act. Last month, Ravitch renounced the same program that she had advocated so persuasively. In her new book, “The Death and Life of the American School System," Ravitch calls No Child Left Behind a strategy of “measuring and punishing" which led to “cheating and gaming the system.”

Speaking on National Public Radio, Ravitch said, “Instead of raising standards, it [has] actually lowered standards because many states have ‘dumbed-down’ their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are." Moreover, Ravitch claims that the excessive time on testing and test preparation today has forced schools to de-prioritize important subjects like history, music, and art. “The kids are getting a worse education as a result of No Child Left Behind.”

Ravitch is a woman of integrity who admits that the very school improvement strategy that she made appear credible to the public has actually failed. Unfortunately, President Obama, like George W. Bush, still hasn’t seen the light. Obama supported the firing of the entire teaching staff in Central Falls, Rhode Island last month – a move which was justified and made possible by the No Child Left Behind act for which Ravitch used to advocate. In a recent article about the dismissal of teachers in Central Falls, Ravitch wrote that "[Obama's] own education reform plans are built right on top of the shaky foundation of President Bush's No Child Left Behind program. The fundamental principle of school reform, in the Age of Bush and Obama, is measure and punish. If students don't get high enough scores, then someone must be punished! If the graduation rate hovers around 50%, then someone must be punished. This is known as 'accountability'."

So what is wrong with insisting on accountability? Nothing, as long as you know who is accountable. No Child Left Behind has failed because it is based on an unproven premise – that the educational failures in many communities are due to failing schools rather than a myriad of other socioeconomic factors. Yet No Child Left Behind was an easy ‘sell’ precisely because it placed the onus of educational improvement on the teachers and required nothing of parents, families, or whole communities except their support of the simplistic ‘get tough with teachers’ policy.

But are teachers really responsible? If a fireman saves a few people from a burning building but is unable to save those caught in a raging inferno three floors above, do we still call him a hero or a failure for not doing the impossible? In the educational world, many people blame the teachers for not doing the impossible instead of offering praise for making the most out of a very difficult situation. Is it possible in the most difficult school districts -- beset with problems of poverty, violence, absentee parents, aberrant student behavior, ESL, and inadequate special needs resources -- that teachers are actually heroes for demonstrating unrelenting commitment to students and accomplishing what they can in suboptimal learning environments?

The irony about No Child Left Behind is that the very strategy designed to promote clear analytical thinking in American youths was based on shallow, superficial, non-analytical thinking. And a lot of American adults supported it without thinking.

________________

Note: This is the second in a three-part series on education:
Part 1, "Let's fire the teachers,"
Part 3, "5 Steps to better education in America (and why all of them will be rejected)."

Let's fire the teachers by David Gilfix

2010-03-08T17:57:00.081-05:00

Here’s a way to fix our broken educational system: Let’s fire all the teachers.

That’s what the school board decided last month in Central Falls, Rhode Island – they fired the entire high school faculty (no, that’s not a misprint). In brief, Central Falls is an immigrant town of 19,000, with a 13.8 percent unemployment rate, where 61 percent of students receive free or subsidized lunch. Less than 50 percent of the students graduate, and by 11th grade, only 7 percent of the students earn proficient math scores.   Clearly, this is not a thriving academic environment.

So they fired all the teachers.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that.   The school board fired the faculty because the teachers refused to implement certain remedies. Supposedly. However this is all spin. The teachers never explicitly refused the school board’s directives, rather they pointed out that these new responsibilities were extensive, time consuming, and not required in their contract – hence the need for negotiations.

Then they fired the teachers.

So the teachers weren’t fired because of low student academic performance but because of teacher insubordination. Supposedly. But insubordination usually involves a refusal to abide by responsibilities that are delineated in a contract. In this case, the new directives involved duties either missing or not clearly stated in the teachers’ contract, depending on which side you believe. Either way, the situation should have been resolved through negotiations – that is, unless the school board wanted an excuse to terminate the faculty.

Firing teachers and support staff is a wonderfully dramatic way to demonstrate anger and frustration with our educational system. Conservative columnists and talk show hosts who make their living being wonderfully dramatic and frustrated are jumping on the Central Falls School Board Committee bandwagon and praising its members for supporting the students against the evil teachers’ unions. Yet, the conservatives are not alone; even President Obama has defended the decision, saying, “If a school continues to fail its students year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability.”

On the surface, President Obama’s comments make sense, don’t they? But if the teachers have truly failed, at the very least we should be able to identify how – a task made simple since columnists and talk show hosts seem to have already identified the teachers’ shortcomings both in Central Falls and nationally. All we need do is investigate the charges to determine which ones are accurate.

So let’s begin.

The Charge:
The teachers are lazy.

The Reality:

Some are. However, by all reputable accounts, most teachers work very hard. This writer is curious about where and how these columnists gathered their data about teacher laziness (or if they were too lazy to do any real research themselves). In the Central Falls Schools example, even the school committee doesn’t deny reports that many teachers went beyond the call of duty, arriving early and staying quite late on a daily basis to provide students with remedial help.

This writer became better aware of the misperceptions of the teaching profession when his sister-in-law, a former lawyer, became a public school French teacher, and his brother, who works at a major corporation, was shocked at how she devoted almost every evening and weekend to class preparation and student grading. Apparently, many people think that a teacher’s workday ends when the students leave.   It simply does not. For most teachers, it continues many hours after student dismissal and lasts long into the evening.

More pointedly, if our educational problems were somehow related to teacher laziness as some of these radio talk show hosts believe, then the worst performing schools would employ the laziest teachers, and the best performing schools would employ those who are hardest working. But there is absolutely no evidence that either of those statements is correct.

The Charge
The teachers are stupid and incompetent.

The Reality
Some are.   Like most professionals including doctors, politicians, journalists, and those in the business field, you will find most teachers to be competent, a few incompetent, and a few to be exceedingly sharp. Students certainly learn more from an outstanding teacher than from a poor teacher – that is a truism. However, it doesn’t logically follow that since we know students learn more from an outstanding teacher than from a poor teacher, poor students must have learned from poor teachers and outstanding students must have studied from outstanding teachers.

At the Central Falls High School, non-teacher related conditions that could have influenced learning include the economy (85 percent of the students were classified as financially disadvantaged); parental involvement; academic background of the parents; English proficiency (22 percent were designated to have “limited” English proficiency); available resources for students with significant learning challenges and behavioral issues (23 percent were on Individualized Educational Plans, “IEP”s); class size (probably large); violence in the school and neighborhood; and school resources (apparently the school had run out of pencils).

The Charge
If the students aren’t learning then the school has failed. Period. The teachers’ job is to make sure the students overcome their environmental challenges.

The Reality
Some well-intentioned people including President Obama support this charge. They refuse to accept the probability that students in certain schools might be less likely to succeed academically, which is admirable. However, their solution confuses an arbitrary job definition - that it is the teachers’ responsibility is to make sure students overcome environmental conditions - for an education policy.   Saying it doesn’t make it true. What if the job definition is contradicted by our best understanding of teachers’ true influence?

Consider this: A global study of identical twins, undertaken by The University of New England in Australia, suggests that teachers only have a minor role in how well students learn. The 10-year study tracked identical twins in Australia, the United States, and other countries, and compared early learning of twins who shared the same teacher versus twins who had different teachers.

Since identical twins, of course, share the same genetics and environmental influences (parents, home, and neighborhood), the study provided a unique method of voiding the impact of environmental conditions (which were extremely similar) in order to determine the influence of different teachers. The results were quite revealing. As reported by Andrew Leigh, professor of the Research School of Economics, Australia, the study suggests that only 8 percent of the variation in students’ early acquisition of literacy and spelling skills could be attributed to the “teacher effect.” Further, the study also shows that differences in schools have little effect on children literacy levels.

According to Professor Byrne who spearheaded the research, the findings contradict claims by some people that “teacher quality could account for a variance of 40 percent in a child’s learning outcome.”

Concordant with the Twin study, many a not-lazy teacher has noticed a similar pattern among students when teachers switch jobs from high performing schools to low performing schools, or vice-versa. If the students in the low performing school were the victims of bad teaching (from stupid and incompetent teachers) and the students in the high performing schools were the beneficiaries of excellent teaching (from smart, competent teachers) then logically the performance of students would reverse when the teachers switched jobs.   Yet, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that this happens.

The Charge
Teachers and their unions are greedy.

The Reality
Some are. Especially if your definition of “greedy” is demanding mostly middle class or slightly above middle class wages for preparing the next generation of decision makers.   One thing is certain, one could only be a greedy teacher if he were also a stupid teacher; a smart person motivated by greed would have chosen a less stressful, less time-consuming, higher paying profession.

More to the point, if our educational problems were caused by unions, as certain radio talk show hosts assert, then the schools systems with the most effective unions – those that provide the most generous compensation – would be the worst academic performers. Yet the opposite is the case; schools that provide the best compensation, thanks in part to their so-called greedy unions, also perform the best academically. Clearly, unions are not the cause of our educational problems.

A Face Saving Compromise
The decision to fire the faculty and staff at Central Falls High School was an act of frustration rather than clear thinking.   As of Wednesday, March 3, The Central Falls School Board had announced a likely compromise that would preserve most of the teachers’ jobs. The instructors have agreed to longer hours and more rigorous evaluations and training, among other steps.

Requiring teachers to work longer hours might yield some results if it is part of a policy to extend the school day for the students.

The second part of the compromise seems like a face saving measure for the school board. If the problem were one of inadequate teacher training or inadequate teacher evaluations then we would have to assume that the present and past principals at Central Falls High School were incapable of evaluating and hiring competent teachers (all the teachers who were employed until now must have received relatively positive evaluations in order to have been candidates for the blanket dismissal). Any principal who hires only incompetent teachers and then gives them positive evaluations must be uniquely unqualified. Moreover, the Central Falls superintendents and school board members who hired such an incompetent principal must have been uniquely unqualified for making such a poor choice.

Maybe the school board members should fire themselves.

Thinking deeper about education
Many adults evaluate their own education not by the number of teachers with whom they studied but by whether they were fortunate enough to have had even one teacher who exerted a profound positive influence on them.    Teachers matter. However, the question for policy makers is not whether teachers matter but how to best turn around poor students, poor schools, and overall negative trends in public education.

Teachers alone cannot solve our educational challenges.   They cannot turn low performing schools into high performing schools; and in general – with some exceptions – they cannot turn individual student performance around. What the very best teachers can and should do, in the opinion of this writer, is the following:

Help foster a love and respect for learning and thinking.
Help students learn as much as possible for themselves at this time in their lives, given their intellectual talents as well as unique environmental handicaps or advantages.
Be respectful and caring.

Is this enough? Certainly, there are many educational "experts" who provide excellent advise about how teachers can improve their techniques to get better “output” from students. While many of their suggestions appear well founded, in the most challenging schools they often ignore realities that trump their own wisdom, such as discipline and behavioral issues, home environment, and economic problems.

Any teacher who can help foster love and respect for learning, help students learn as much as possible in spite of their environmental handicaps or other disadvantages, and can serve as a role model for students of a respectful caring adult is performing a huge service to students and society. There is little more we can ask of our teachers.

But these steps alone won’t solve our educational challenges.

Sadly, there are no easy answers to our educational challenges. In a Washington Post article by Nick Anderson, Russ Whitehurst, a Brookings Institution Scholar who directed education research under President George Bush, says, "There just is very little evidence in terms of what works in quickly turning around a persistently low-performing school."

Everybody wants to fix our educational system, and there is nothing wrong with that, but nobody seems to know what is broken.

Is it possible that our educational challenges have little to do with the schools at all?
___________________

Note: This is the first in a three-part series on education:
Part 2, Diane Ravitch can see clearly now. Can we?
Part 3, 5 Steps to better education in America (and why all of them will be rejected)

Talk Radio and Christmas by David Gilfix

2009-12-21T19:01:00.012-05:00

It’s happening again; they’re trying to take away Christmas. I know this for sure because I was listening to conservative talk radio (which in Boston is redundant, since there is no liberal talk radio), and the radio host went on and on about how you can’t sing Christmas carols in public schools or take class field trips to Santa Clause movies. Even worse, they’re removing nativity scenes from public squares, taking crosses off of courthouses, and doing all sorts of other horrible things. The “they” to whom the radio hosts refer are the liberals.

Conservative talk radio hosts come in different flavors. One of my all-time favorites was Barry Farber of New York City who would read "The Night Before Christmas" in Yiddish on Christmas Eve. A conservative, southern-born Jewish history buff well versed in 25 languages, Farber thrived on provocative, thought-provoking behavior (like reading "The Night Before Christmas" in Yiddish). Yiddish was the common dialect of East European Jewry during centuries of oppression. European born grandparents of American Jews from my generation were subjected to pogroms (organized riots) in their shtetles (villages) especially around Christian holidays; many Jews were beaten and killed. By choosing to read a Christmas story in a Jewish language spoken during a time of great oppression, Farber was certainly not advocating that his Jewish listeners celebrate Christmas but rather reminding them that they no longer had to fear it.

Still, America is imperfect, and the Jewish experience here, like that of many immigrants, includes a history of discrimination. In my parents’ generation, Jews were restricted from entering Ivy League schools, corporations, country clubs, hotels, and housing in non-Jewish neighborhoods. Not fun at all. However, all of that pales in comparison to the Jewish experience in Europe, which includes centuries of mass expulsions, crusades, inquisition, ghettos, blood libels, and pogroms, all culminating but not ending with the Holocaust. Most of those discriminations in America have been overcome, so much that Jews have reached high governmental positions and become CEOs and presidents of the same universities and corporations which used to discriminate against them.

Indeed, Farber once prefaced his annual reading of the Christmas classic in Yiddish by remarking that in America Jews and Christians have the best relations ever. Jews familiar with their own history in Europe would be hard pressed to disagree. Today, positive Jewish-Christian relations in America have gone way beyond the absence of rancor and discrimination. There is unprecedented sharing, learning, and appreciation for each other’s respective traditions.

All this brings me back to the “war” on Christmas which, according to the talk show hosts, is being waged by the bad liberals to prevent others from celebrating Christmas to its fullest. The sage philosopher Groucho Marks once quipped, “Who do you believe, me or your eyes?” Good question. My eyes are hurting. Where are the people who can’t celebrate Christmas?

From Thanksgiving onward, we are inundated with Christmas: radio stations play Christmas music constantly, some 24 hours a day; television stations highlight Christmas episodes or replay traditional Christmas shows and movies; Christmas lights are everywhere; children wear Santa Clause hats; adults wear Christmas-colored clothes; people talk about what they will do for Christmas; and everyone wishes everyone a “Merry Christmas” as if it’s a universal holiday that nobody could possibly find even the least bit foreign or contrary to personal practice.

Talk show hosts complain that the politically-correct crowd discourages “us” from indiscriminately wishing “Merry Christmas” to strangers who might be Jew, Muslim, or otherwise non-Christian. I wouldn’t exactly call this a “war” on Christmas. Perhaps the talk radio hosts are confusing the concept of “war” with the concept of using common sense.

The same critics lament how you can’t sing Christmas carols in school anymore -- interesting that they don’t lament how no one ever sang non-Christian holiday melodies except for the token Chanukah songs included in the annual Christmas concerts in a misinformed attempt at ecumenicalism. Truth be told, teaching and celebrating one of the least important Jewish holidays along with one of the most important Christian holidays is not exactly being ecumenical.

Personally, I love Christmas songs and winter holiday type songs, and I’m irrationally proud that so many were written or co-written by Jews. Which ones, you might ask?   The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire), Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Baby, Holly Jolly Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas, Silver Bells, It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Sleigh Ride (Jewish lyricist), Silver Bells (Jewish lyricist), Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and White Christmas. Aha! Disallowing Christmas songs in the public schools isn’t discrimination against Christians, it’s discrimination against Jewish composers!

On a more serious level (although it really is hard to be serious about this topic), the reason why Americans have more freedom of religion than other countries is precisely because the constitutional separation of Church and State guarantees that no religion will have undue preference over any other. Jews who have many times experienced real wars on their religion should be forgiven for thinking there’s something a little nuts about the cries of a “war” on Christmas.

But the radio hosts are right that there is a real push against Christmas.

They’re just wrong about the culprits (overzealous conservative talk radio hosts often get confused). It’s not the liberals but rather people who gain commercially who have insidiously converted Christmas into nothing more than the culmination of a national shopping month. Today, the term “Merry Christmas” has become a euphemism for “have a prosperous shopping season” or, worse, “please buy my products.” As a result, many children now see Christmas as little more than a day to receive presents.

Of course, all this is fine for people who don’t really care about the holiday’s religious meaning and simply enjoy exchanging gifts. Freedom of religion includes the freedom from religion. As Julia Child would say about an overcooked Bœuf Bourguignon, C’est la vie! On the other hand, since I have had the good fortune to be friends with Christians who do take their religion seriously, I appreciate their difficulty in celebrating the birth of Jesus when it seems everyone else is pushing them to celebrate shopping.

It probably doesn’t help when conservative talk radio hosts use Christmas to boost their own ratings by manipulating listeners' wrath against a non-existent attack on the holiday that they pretend to care so much about.

Bill Cosby and the Goal of True Comedy by David Gilfix

2009-11-15T15:02:00.019-05:00

Of all the things performing artists do, the hardest is making people laugh -- especially the way Bill Cosby does it.

It’s easy to make people clap. If you play music decently, the audience will clap, even if they don’t really like the performance. I’ve clapped at some performances that I hated – because they were over. It’s also easy to make people cry. Just feature an adorable kid in a low budget film and kill him off in the end. Better yet, have an adorable dog that saves the adorable kid but dies in the process. Everybody cries at that; the movie is sure to become a hit, as will its country music soundtrack.

Laughter, on the other hand, is harder to evoke. People don’t laugh when they’re sad, bored, distracted, or angry. They laugh when they truly believe in their gut that something is funny.

There is one exception: people laugh when they feel uncomfortable. And comedians know it’s a lot easier to make audiences feel uncomfortable than to be truly funny.   For example, if you pick on certain members of the audience, everyone else will laugh in relief that they aren’t targeted.   Then there are the tried and true methods of getting cheap laughs (and cheap laughs are better than no laughs), such as telling jokes with swears, crotch jokes, sexual mishap anecdotes, and amusing tales about public figures.

Bill Cosby uses none of those tricks. In fact, he doesn’t even tell jokes.

The first time I heard Bill Cosby do his routine, “To Russell, my brother, with whom I slept with,” I was nine years old. The last time I heard it was with my daughters, also nine years old. There isn’t a single swear in Cosby’s routine; there are no jokes, no shock effects, no barbs at the audience -- just Bill’s true-to-life boyhood memory of staying up way past bedtime with his brother. The brothers jump on the bed until it breaks then conspire on a story, but when Russell wants to tell Dad the truth, Bill threatens that he will have Russell “shipped back,” adding, “You aren’t really my brother anyway.” Dad barges in their room for the third time to order the boys to go to sleep.   Fearful he will use the dreaded belt which has never actually been revealed, the boys tell him that a man climbed in through the window, jumped on the bed until it broke, and climbed back out.

Another brilliant routine, “Natural Child Birth,” recounts the confusion and excitement over the birth of Bill Cosby’s first child and his wife’s attempt to deliver without the use of painkillers. When his wife goes into labor, Bill drives like a maniac from the garage to the front door to get her.   At the hospital, Marx brothers-like characters bring her into the delivery room where a doctor is sitting in front of the bed like Johnny Bench.   On the second contraction, his wife grabs Bill’s lower lip and screams, “I want morphine!” When the baby is finally delivered, it is the greatest moment in their lives, the fulfillment of their prayers. However, Bill has never seen a newborn baby before. He goes over to his wife, lovingly kisses her, stares at the baby, and softly says, “Darling, I love you very, very much. You just had … a lizard.”

Many years ago I taught acting and improvisation at a school for gifted children in New York. After three years, I decided it was time for me to actually learn something, so I took a course with the late great Tamara Wilcox-Smith, creator of the National Improvisational Theatre and teacher of comedians and actors like Jerry Seinfeld, Griffin Dunne, Allyce Beasley, and Rita Rudner. Tamara eschewed off-color humor, not because she was a prude but because she believed real comedy should flow naturally from a story. Off-color humor usually is a crutch for a bad story.

Tamara believed that improvisation and comedy should be used to uplift people. She and her husband Chris Smith adapted their improvisational teaching techniques for the New York schools to help special education, handicapped, and English-as-a-second-language students. They also founded programs that were used at Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with cancer. For them, the highest goal of comedy was not simply entertainment but also positive change.

I never got to discuss Bill Cosby with Tamara, but my guess is that she highly respected him because he personified so much of what she espoused. Cosby never panders for laughs; his humor is organically interwoven within the story line and usually appeals to our higher values. And then there is Cosby’s incredible comedic technique: his musician-like ability to slow down or speed up tempo, and to increase or decrease his volume for maximum effect; his virtuosity with voices and microphone sounds; his amazing facial expressions and body language. Lastly, Cosby understands like Tamara that comedy can be a transformative medium, as demonstrated by his most enduring work, The Cosby Show.

Debuted in 1984, The Cosby Show portrayed the Huxtables, a successful, functional, educated, intelligent, upper middle class black family. The father, Cliff, played by Bill Cosby, is an obstetrician; his wife, Claire, is a lawyer. The three children are normal kids, with normal behavior, and normal problems; they study hard but not always.   If all this seems unremarkable, it’s important to realize that until 1984 black characters on television shows were normally depicted as lazy, irresponsible, and uneducated. They spoke in television-writers’ versions of black slang and were perennially scheming to get ahead rather than studying hard to get an education.

Cosby’s presentation of a successful black family was not without its critics. In the book, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, authors Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis argued that by portraying a black family that succeeded through hard work and education, the show actually reinforced beliefs that unsuccessful blacks are lazy rather than the victims of discrimination.

Jhally and Lewis had a credible thesis. However, in focusing on the unintended negative repercussions of the Cosby Show, they missed by a mile the positive influence that The Cosby Show had on the image of blacks in contemporary American culture.

Great comedy arises when an artist looks at a situation we’ve seen many times and discovers a new way to bring out the irony, absurdity, or silliness. Influential comedians like Richard Pryor and Lennie Bruce often confronted bigotry by presenting exaggerated versions of common racial stereotypes.   Through laughter, we somehow saw the irrationality of a stereotype more clearly, as if the laughter itself was a lens cleaner for our own perceptions.

Bill Cosby does something completely different; he doesn’t confront stereotypes at all. He doesn’t try to persuade his audience that blacks are as capable as whites; rather, he befriends his audience by dramatizing the humor in common human experiences and depicting an image of capable, successful, African Americans. Benjamin Franklin once wrote that if you want to persuade someone about a cause, first convince him that you are his friend.   To Cosby, friendship is the ultimate weapon against bigotry, and nothing wins friends as easily as evoking true laughter.

Cosby has defended his choice not to confront racial topics directly since his early I Spy television series (for which he won three consecutive “Outstanding Lead Actor” Emmy Awards). In the book, Cosby: The Life of a Comedy Legend, author Ronald Smith includes this early Cosby observation, "A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, 'Yeah, that's the way I see it too.' Okay. He's white. I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I'm doing as much for good race relations as the next guy."

Cosby’s image of racial equality has been so influential that some in the media, including show consultant Dr. Alvin Poussaint, have talked about the “Huxtable Effect” on the Obama presidency -- that Cosby’s television family actually helped prepare Americans for a real life Obama family.

Of course, all this might be putting the cart before the horse: Cosby isn’t a funny comedian because he influences people; he influences people because he is funny. However, his level of funniness extends beyond true laughter. The genius of someone like Bill Cosby is not only his ability to make us laugh hysterically without sophomoric tricks but also his ability to help us grow in the process. His transformative influence on comedy and society as a whole prove once again that often the best way to make a point stems not from what you say but how you say it.

What Really Happened in Gaza? by David Gilfix

2009-11-01T14:15:00.017-05:00

This article was published in the Fall 2009 Issue of Midstream magazine.

Imagine that you wanted to understand Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, and were then given a recording only of the string section – the entire wind, brass, and percussion section had been left out. Imagine further that no one told you that those sections were missing, so you believed that Beethoven’s 6th Symphony involved only string instruments. Now, imagine that you wanted to understand the Gaza war, and decided to follow the news. You were presented with photographs, videos and seemingly play-by-play reports of the fighting. Imagine further that no one told you that anything was missing in your news reports, so that you believed you understood what really happened in Gaza.

If you followed the news about the Gaza war, metaphorically you’ve already heard the strings. This discussion will try to fill-in some of the wind, brass, and percussion section.

Two Blockades

To develop a perspective on any political event one must not focus exclusively on that event. Our discussion about Gaza will begin 47 years ago, in a different place: On November 15, 1962, US reconnaissance photos discovered intermediate- range Soviet missiles under construction in Cuba. President Kennedy spent the following week in intensive discussions and debate with twelve of his most trusted advisors. Then on November 22, Kennedy publicly disclosed the existence of the missiles and announced that he was imposing a naval blockade to prevent additional offensive weapons onto Cuban shore. Further, Kennedy declared that any missiles launched from Cuban soil would be considered an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union, including missiles not directly aimed at the United States.

During September 2005, Israel dismantled 21 settlements of 8,500 people from Gaza, leaving Gaza Judenrien for the first time since the 1967 Six-Day War and free, for the first time ever, to establish its own government on its own territory. Prior to 1967, Gaza was under control of Egypt. Many hoped that Israel’s withdrawal would bring about an end to all acts of terrorism emanating from Gaza, including the launching of rockets and missiles into Israel. It did not. Instead, there was an increase in missile attacks from Gaza into Israel.

On January 25, 2006, the militant Islamic group Hamas, which had openly called for the annihilation of Israel, was elected to the leadership of Gaza. Rocket attacks increased even more. According to the Jewish Policy Center, from 2001 until the Hamas takeover in 2007, Palestinians launched roughly 2,021 Qassam rockets into the Western Negev, mainly into the Israeli town of Sderot. Under Hamas rule between mid-June 2007 through January 2008, Palestinians launched 2,227 rockets into Sderot, an average of almost four rockets every day.

Israel’s initial response to the rockets was to impose a blockade around Gaza, similar to Kennedy’s response to the Cuban missile crisis. Israel wanted to prevent residents of Gaza from receiving more offensive weapons. However, therein ends the similarities with the United States. Kennedy had imposed a blockade in response to the mere existence of missiles on Cuban soil. The blockade was a first step. Kennedy made clear that the act of launching a missile – even one directed at a non-US target – would be met with a military response. Israel, on the other hand, was responding to hundreds of rocket attacks with a blockade.

Responding to Threats

Thirty-nine years after the Cuban missile crisis, the United States demonstrated to the world how it would respond if attacked on its own soil. Immediately after 9/11, the United States unloaded with an overpowering military might to topple the Taliban controlled Afghanistani government within which the terrorist group, Al Qaeda, had found safe harbor.

In contrast to the international sympathy and support bestowed upon the United States for their military operations in Afghanistan, critics of Israel decried the country’s response of a blockade as collective punishment. As terrorist attacks increased, Israel responded by closing the borders between it and Gaza. Again, critics bemoaned this as more collective punishment. The United States, as do most countries, restricts those who are allowed to cross her border, but somehow Israel was supposed to allow unrestricted access to citizens of a territory who had elected a party sworn to Israel’s destruction and had since ramped up an organized assault with daily missile launches and numerous attempted suicide bombings. That Israel did not achieve worldwide respect for its military restraint is noteworthy, as was the absence of public criticism of Hamas. Certainly, if Gaza wanted the blockade to end or the freedom for its citizens to travel within Israel, all it needed to do was cease terrorist and rocket attacks.

Apologists for Hamas point out that the Qassam rockets fired into Israel are crude by Israeli standards, difficult to aim accurately, and produce a lower ratio of kills-per-attack than Israel’s more sophisticated missiles – as if this made the attacks acceptable. Regardless, many Israelis have been killed, maimed, or permanently scarred, and from years of rocket bombardments countless children have been traumatized.

Curiously, justification for the ongoing assaults from Gaza is rarely questioned, just as the logic behind the justification of terrorism is rarely challenged. For decades, terrorist apologists have claimed that terrorism was a weapon for battling Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These apologists conveniently ignored or obfuscated information that contradicted their claims, such as the fact that Palestinian terrorism commenced prior to the 67 War -- before Israel controlled the disputed territories. Further, they ignored the history of Arabs and Palestinians rejecting Israel’s offers to return land for peace both at Khartoum in 1967 and at Camp David in 2000.

Of course, even Israel’s severest critics had understood that in light of Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza, the “occupation” theory no longer held water. Instead, Palestinian apologists scrambled for new reasons to justify the daily barrage of rocket attacks into Israel:

They blamed Israel for the blockade of Gaza, which restricted free trade, conveniently ignoring the fact that the blockade was a response to, rather than a cause of the rocket attacks.

They criticized Israel for restricting travel of Gaza citizens into Israel, once again ignoring the cause of the restrictions.

When travel was allowed, they criticized Israel for searching women and children, conveniently ignoring that Hamas had used both women and children as suicide murderers. Recently, in fact, Hamas made an official ruling that women can also achieve salvation through suicide murders.

They criticized Israel for restricting free travel of ambulances, conveniently ignoring that Hamas had used ambulances both to transport terrorists into Israel and weapons into Gaza.

The list goes on and on. While Gaza was sending rockets into Israel, Israel was supplying Gaza with electricity, water, and other necessities, marking perhaps the first time in human history that one country provided for the welfare of a country with whom it was at war. Amazingly, Palestinian apologists criticized Israel for this, too, because when rocket attacks increased, Israel responded by restricting (but never eliminating) their handout of these necessities.

Hamas

So why does Hamas attack Israel? This author believes that in order to understand the motivation of a people or the goals of a movement, step one is to respect what they say. Here is what the Hamas Charter says about Israel:

'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.' (Preamble)

'The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.' (Article 6)

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' (Article 7)

'Palestine is an Islamic land... Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be.' (Article 13)

Interestingly, the Hamas Charter mentions none of the aforementioned talking points around which apologists usually excuse terrorism and missile attacks. The reason Hamas battles Israel, according to the Charter, is because Israel exists on “Islamic land,” and therefore the liberation of Palestine is the “duty” of all Moslems.

Palestinians loyal to the Hamas Charter understand that the missile attacks should be viewed as part of a battle against the existence of Israel. Sderot, because of its proximity to Gaza, is simply the first of many towns that must be attacked. In February 2006, shortly after Hamas came to power and after a marked increase in daily missile attacks into Israel, Worldnet News service reported the following:
The only way to stop the regular rocket fire on Sderot, an Israeli city of about 20,000 nearly three miles from the Gaza Strip border, is for the Jewish state to evacuate the entire city, Hamas announced in a statement Wednesday. "Only the departure of residents from Sderot will stop the rocket fire," Abu Abaida, spokesman for Hamas' so-called military wing, said in a statement to reporters.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 without a peace treaty to guarantee its safety. Many considered that decision rash, especially because Israel was defending itself daily from rocket and terrorist attacks from Gaza. Defenders of Israel’s decision argued that once Israel withdrew, Gaza citizens would no longer have reason to attack. One person who disagreed was Minister of Finance (and now Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in protest. Netanyahu said that the pullout would create a huge base for Islamic terror. Sadly, Netanyahu was right.

Cease-fire; Resume Fire

The proximate cause for the recent fighting was the decision by Hamas to terminate an Egypt-brokered truce that had commenced in August 2008. In reality, there was never a complete truce; even during the six-month official cessation in hostilities, Gaza has occasionally lobbed rockets into Israel. Additionally, Hamas has used the ceasefire both to resupply itself with rockets, including the medium-range Grad-type Katyusha rockets, and to smuggle out its soldiers for training in Iran and Syria.

Israel had requested that the truce be extended another six months. Ten days before the truce was to terminate, Palestinian spokesmen announced that Hamas was rejecting Israel’s request. Gaza commenced an unprecedented barrage of missile attacks. During the first eight days after Hamas formally rejected the ceasefire, Gaza fired 170 rockets into Israel; this includes 80 rockets fired on December 24, alone.

Israel issued several warnings, which Hamas ignored, and then finally Israel struck back. War had begun.

Parcheesi

More than once this writer has encountered good people who have questioned why Israel should be considered the victim when many more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed. Implied in the question is a supposition: that victimhood is related to loser status. It simply is not. Victimhood has to do with issues of aggression and defense. A wrongful attack remains a wrongful attack regardless of whether or not the attackers are successful; the target of that attack should be considered the victim.

People who struggle with separating numbers of casualties from their concepts about morality in the Middle East conflict should understand that their feelings, however sincere, are neither logical nor moral. Instead, they are viewing the conflict as if it were a friendly game of Parcheesi, where both sides are supposed to be evenly matched.

Under Parcheesi thinking, an even number of casualties is preferred, and when there is a disparity of casualties, the loser is conferred victim status, and the winner is dubbed the villain. While absurd, the reader might have noticed variations of this type of thinking prevalent in much of the anti-Israel rhetoric. It involves a standard of ethics based on a reverse assessment of military prowess, where the side with the most inferior military wins sympathy simply for being the underdog (more Parcheesi thinking).

To such critics, the only way Israel could successfully assert that they are the victims in this conflict would be to lose their battles. Presumably, Israel should only defend itself marginally; then after Israel suffers massive casualties, those same critics might finally be convinced about the enormity of Palestinian terrorism and missile attacks.

So how should clear thinking people view the disparity in the number of Israeli and Palestinian casualties? They should understand that war is not a game, and that being open-minded doesn’t mean being morally ambiguous. There is a clear moral difference between committing acts of aggression and responding to acts of aggression.

Certainly, any amount of casualties is hard to accept and bespeaks the tragic consequences to war. However, the reality is that Gaza, by its own admission, wanted to destroy the Jewish community of Sderot and had been pounding Sderot and neighboring regions for eight straight years. The war began when Gaza refused to extend the truce for six months and unleashed an unprecedented barrage of missile attacks into Israel. The war could have ended immediately if Gaza had simply agreed to stop attacking Israel.

Conversely, should Israel have chosen not to fight back, it would have inevitably suffered massive casualties. Eventually, shell-shocked residents would have uprooted themselves, and businesses would have failed or relocated. Under these circumstances, Sderot would have soon become a ghost town. The aftermath of such a situation is easy to predict (one need only read the Hamas charter): Hamas would have then directed its rockets and terrorists attacks at the next closest Israeli town, starting the cycle all over again.

People should not expect Israel to cease retaliatory measures prematurely for a war it did not initiate, especially when the defense of its citizens and their long-term security were paramount. Given this reality, clear thinking people should actually view the disparity in casualties as morally justified, since Israel is not the aggressor and is simply trying to exist.

Proportionality

Like the term “victim,” critics of Israel banter about the term “proportionality,” often without any understanding of how that word applies to international conflicts.

Many people believe proportionality requires that the military force of a country be even in capability with the military force of an aggressor. So for example, if Palestinians attempt repeatedly to kill citizens in Sderot but have a low kills-per-missile success rate, then out of fairness Israel should be equally unsuccessful when it retaliates. That, in essence, was at the roots of the recent criticisms of Israel. During the war in Gaza, many more Palestinians were killed in response to attacks on Israel than Israelis who had been killed by the attacks on Israel; therefore Israel’s response was considered disproportionate.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Israel would have to wait until it first suffered a devastating attack before delivering a knockout blow to the Gaza terrorist apparatus, in order for their military response to be considered proportional. Of course, such a scenario would be absurd. It is the responsibility of every country to defend its citizens before they suffer a devastating act of aggression. Further, the laws of proportionality are guided by an understanding and acknowledgement that this responsibility is both logical and moral.

Rosalyn Higgins, president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote in her book, Problems and Process, that “[proportionality] cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury – it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression.” Further, she wrote, “…and that may mean that the use of force is proportionate, even though it is a more severe use of force than any single prior incident may have seemed to have warranted.”

In other words, international law recognizes that a military response does not have to be proportional to the success of previous acts of aggression; rather, it must be proportional to the goals of those acts of aggression. Israel does not have to wait until a hospital is blown up or for Sderot to be liquidated before responding with overwhelming military force. The goals and acts of Hamas, both of which are war crimes, justify Israel’s response.

Sez’ Who?

The photographs and television images from the recent war in Gaza are distressing. Good people reflexively flinch at the sight of death and suffering, and Gaza has certainly experienced its share of both since Israel launched its military response to years of aggression. The challenge is to prevent this reflexive flinch from becoming a reflexive condemnation of Israel.

The renowned physicist Haim Harari, president of the Weizmann Institute, has written a fascinating article on the topic of media manipulation, “A View From the Target Zone.” Throughout the Gaza war, major television stations and newspapers throughout the world provided their audiences with a plethora of reports, videos, and photographs. Harari charges that the media failed to divulge that the sources for much of their information were Palestinian operatives or the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. The UNRWA is a controversial if not heavily biased organization that many people believe has perpetuated the refugee problem by resisting all efforts to resettle Palestinian refugees outside of Israel. The UNRWA employs many Hamas members. Among those include the headmaster and science teacher of a UNRWA school who was eulogized as being a member of Islamic Jihad and a leader in rocket designs, as reported on CNN. When media declares that its information about either Gaza or the West Bank comes from “UN sources,” it usually refers to the UNRWA.

According to Harari, the reason news media got their information from pro-Hamas Palestinian operatives or from the UNRWA is that there were few real journalists operating in Gaza. Most left after numerous episodes of reporters being threatened, beaten, or kidnapped, and at least one who was murdered; charges that are supported by the non-partisan CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), which provides details about numerous incidents.

Since virtually all the information provided to news agencies came from pro Hamas sources, readers can better understand why their emotional response to the war might not have been based on accurate journalism. Harari cites several examples of journalism bias including:

Almost all photographs and films of Palestinian casualties focused on children, even though most of the casualties were males in their late teens to early twenties; the exact profile of most Hamas militants.

Televisions and newspapers displayed photographs of Israelis fighting near schools, but showed no photographs of hundreds of rockets being launched at Israel from schoolyards or crowded neighborhoods. (On television, Hamas always launched their rockets from open fields). Nor were there reports about Hamas using schools to store rockets and explosives.

Newspapers displayed several photographs that were revealed to be fakes, such as a famous picture of poor Palestinians using candles (supposedly because the bad Israelis had cancelled their electricity). However, through cracks in the black-curtain background the reader can clearly see sunlight. In another instance, the same child, wearing painted blood, was photographed in different settings, each time with a different father.

Television stations worldwide broadcast testimony of a Norwegian doctor describing horrible Israeli abuses. The stations failed to mention that this man was a supporter of Hamas and had demonstrated support for the 9/11 attacks on national Norwegian television.

On January 7, 2008, CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported, “Inside Gaza, press controlled by Hamas is heavy handed. There are few press freedoms inside Gaza, and Hamas controls who reports from there and where they can go.   While pictures of wounded children being brought to hospital are clearly encouraged, we rarely see images of Hamas fighters or their rockets being fired into Israel.”

Palestinian apologists often counter that Israeli sources are equally biased, however this argument is demonstrably false. One merely need read the on-line versions of Israeli newspapers to find numerous articles that are starkly critical of Israel. Israeli papers, like newspapers everywhere, print the most malicious accusations against Israel. Clearly, journalists in Israel are not kidnapped, beaten, or murdered for printing anti-Israel articles.

Of course, none of these examples are meant to imply that Israel is blameless or that it doesn’t make mistakes. However, it is important to recognize both that the media hyper-focuses on Israel’s blemishes to the exclusion of much worse actions elsewhere, and that almost all accusations against Israel originating from Gaza or the West Bank come from sources that must demonstrate pro-Palestinian bias in order to continue working there.

Given these realities, responsible news organizations should go so far as to include disclaimers with every news story to inform readers that since reporters are aware of colleagues being harmed, physically threatened, and deported for writing stories critical of the Palestinian government, all news reports from Gaza or the West Bank are most likely biased.

Since no news organization has yet demonstrated the integrity to include such a disclaimer with their stories, responsible news consumers should prepare a simple response to all accusations about Israel: “Sez’ who?”

Innocent Victims

In April 2002, following months of terrorists’ attacks in Israel that culminated in a suicide explosion at a restaurant on Passover in which 29 civilians were killed, the Israeli army entered the Jenin refuge camp to root out the terrorists. Shortly thereafter, television stations and newspapers worldwide reported that Israel had committed a massacre. Quoting from Palestinian spokesmen like Saeb Erekat, news organizations reported that Israel had killed 3,000 Palestinians, and was hiding the bodies in mass graves. Spokesmen for Yasser Arafat appeared on American television describing Israeli atrocities.

The outcry was deafening. Major newspapers printed editorials blasting Israel’s actions and comparing them to Pol Pot and Nazis. Israel was widely condemned by church leaders, human rights groups (including Amnesty International), heads of the European Parliament, members of the United Nations, Desmond Tutu, and even Bianca Jagger, just to name a few. Even certain left-leaning Jewish groups voiced their condemnation. This writer remembers discussions with Jewish friends who declared that Israel’s actions in Jenin made them “ashamed.”

The figure of 3,000 deaths was later reduced to 500 deaths. Then, after the military operation terminated, Palestinian hospitals reported that the total number of deaths was not 500, but 52 – corroborated by the group, Human Rights Watch. Even the Palestinian Authority finally admitted that there had been no massacre.

Post military analyses of Israel’s operation in Jenin revealed that Israel had taken on unusually high risks and incurred high casualties (23 Israelis were killed) in order to avoid killing innocent victims. Of the 52 Palestinian deaths, all but 3 were combatants. As a testament to Israel’s military conduct in Jenin, the US Marines studied Israel’s operation as a model of how a moral army should fight terrorism in an urban setting.

Unfortunately, not all military operations can be so flawless. The sad truth about wars -- any war -- is that sometimes it is impossible to avoid civilian casualties. On January 7, 2009, one of the worst incidents in the Gaza war made newspaper headlines: Israel had shelled a UN school and 43 civilians were killed. The civilian casualties were assumed to be students. As expected, the outcry against Israel was deafening; even some conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal printed columns criticizing Israel. Editorials charged that Israel had responded “disproportionally” to the Gaza rockets. John Ging, UNRWA's operations director in Gaza, quickly condemned the attack as "horrific" and claimed that Israel knew it was targeting a UN facility. The charges went on and on.

There was only one problem: the charges that Israel had fired on a school were false. Newspapers and televisions had relied on UNRWA sources without checking the veracity of the claims. In post-war analyses, even the UN, which had released the story, admitted that their school had not been attacked. It is also quite doubtful that 43 civilians were killed from the military attack near the school. Initial reports from Palestinian Medical sources claimed that 12 people were killed in fighting near the school. Different Israeli sources estimated the casualties to be between 12 and 23 people, and suggested that many of those killed were combatants.

Fighting Terrorists

The Gaza war claimed the lives of more Palestinian fighters and Palestinian civilians than Israelis. This is a reality. However, it is facile and illogical to draw conclusions about liability based on casualty comparisons, despite what many in the media might assume.

Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted as saying that Hamas committed two war crimes, first by attacking Israeli civilians, and second by attacking them from civilian areas. People who are knowledgeable about the rules of war concur; the Geneva Convention clearly proscribes both activities; the first because it involves willfully killing innocent victims, and the second because the act of fighting in a heavily populated territory de-facto uses innocent civilians as human shields (hostages) to prevent counterattacks. However, under internationally recognized rules of engagement, a country defending itself under these circumstances is not responsible for the civilians it accidentally kills; responsibility lies with the country that created the human shields.

In the Gaza war, Hamas was clearly attacking Israel from highly populated areas, including apartment buildings, schoolyards, mosques, hospital zones, and so on. They created a strategy in which it would have been impossible for any country to defend itself without inflicting some civilian casualties. Moreover, by formally breaking the ceasefire and unloading an unprecedented barrage of rockets attacks into Israel, Hamas created a situation where Israel had to defend itself. A country under attack is not only responsible for defending its citizens, it is morally obligated to do so.

Readers might do well to consider whether there is any other country – including their own – that would have waited eight years, withstanding over 4,000 missile attacks and countless suicide murders (and many more failed suicide attacks), before deciding to fight back.

To better understand why Hamas was responsible for the civilian casualties in Gaza, imagine the geo-political and moral implications of accepting a different standard of rules of engagement. Imagine how citizens of any country would be able to defend themselves if the situation were reversed and the country defending itself from attacks was now legally responsible for the death of the human shields (hostages) of the attacker:

First, there would be no incentive for terrorists not to hide behind civilians, since the laws would protect the terrorists and discourage victims from retaliating against their crimes.

Second, there would no longer be any legal distinction between targeting civilians and accidentally killing civilians in defense against terrorist attacks; this would de-facto suggest that terrorism is not a war crime.

Even in the US, hostages accidentally killed in an attempt to subdue a criminal are the responsibility of the criminal; the legal term for this is “felony murder.”

Certainly, a moral country should take measures to minimize civilian casualties during a war, which Israel has done: Israel sent phone calls and text messages to Gaza residents warning them of an impending strike against Hamas. When a Palestinian house was targeted, for either storing weapons or housing combatants, residents were called and given fifteen minutes to evacuate. In addition, numerous military activities were aborted at the last minute to avoid civilian casualties. As Haim Harari wrote, “Never in history, has any country made such an enormous effort to avoid civilian casualties in fighting against murderers who target only civilians and never anything else. No one in Kosovo, Serbia, Georgia, or Iraq was offered such a courtesy by the bombing and attacking powers.”

Unfortunately, even with Israel’s best efforts innocent civilians were killed. In the Gaza war the total casualties were somewhere between 1400, as cited by UN sources, and 600, as cited by Italian Journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi of Corriere della Sera. Cremonesi felt that the UN figures were grossly overstated, and based his own figures on interviews with doctors and civilians as well as reviews of hospital records. If 25 percent of the casualties were civilians, as UN sources claimed early on, then at the high end the Gaza war claimed 350 Palestinian civilians.

The Facade of Morality

Every civilian casualty in Gaza, Israel, or anywhere else is a tragedy. In an ideal world, these senseless deaths would propel people to protest those who instigate war for their own pernicious goals. In a cynical world, people would ignore the senseless deaths, remain mute about those who cause wars, and point their collective finger in judgment again one nation over all others. Which world do we live in?

Even before the Gaza war ended, Israel was accused of war crimes. Many people, especially those on the political left, were sympathetic to these accusations. Recently, The U.N. Human Rights Council approved authorization of a delegation to investigate the charges. The U.N. Human Rights Council includes countries like Libya, Angola, Cuba, Nigeria, and China. A complete list of countries on the U.N. Human Rights Council includes many of the worst violators of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, press, religion, women’s equality, and sexual persuasion. Israel, on the other hand is one of the few countries in the UN that upholds these freedoms, albeit imperfectly.

In 2005, The UN passed 19 resolutions condemning Israel, and not a single resolution against Sudan for the 200,000 people killed in the genocide in Darfur. The UN never investigated war crimes in the Lebanese civil war which claimed over 150,000 lives between 1975 and 1990, or in Algeria where Islamists slaughtered over 200,000 people between 1999 and 2006, or the recent fighting between Russia and Chechnya, in which Russia killed tens of thousands of people (many civilians) in their attempt to oust the Islamists. There were few outcries about civilian casualties.

According to German sociologist, Gunnar Heinsohn, who heads the Raphael-Lemkin-Institute for Comparative Genocide Research at the University of Bremen, in the last sixty years, 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks; almost all the victims were killed by other Muslims. The reader would do well to ask how many times the UN investigated “war crimes,” for any of those acts.

Hudson Institute Scholar Anne Bayefsky writes that The U.N. Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations than any other country. In fact, according to Bayefsky, The U.N. Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than resolutions condemning all 191 UN member states combined. Are we supposed to believe that Israel has committed more human rights violations than the sum total of 191 countries, including Sudan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Chechnya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, China, Cuba, and Afghanistan?

An examination of the unique membership makeup of the U.N. Human Rights Council provides grounds to question their impartiality: Bayefsky asserts that when the Council is in session "all U.N. member states meet to strategize and share information in one of the U.N.’s five regional groups. All that is, except Israel. At the Council, Israel is denied membership in any regional group, including the amalgam of Western states to which the United States belongs." Since Israel is denied membership in regional groups it is also the only country denied membership in the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

In the first year of US military activity against Afghanistan, estimates of civilian casualties ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 according to various news organizations. Thankfully, most people understood that even with their best efforts the US military could not avoid civilian casualties in a war against terrorists. In contradistinction to the widespread condemnations against Israel for its military operation in Gaza, there were no accusations about US war crimes, even though the US military made mistakes, including sometimes firing on buildings that housed civilians, and sometimes shooting civilians who they believed to be terrorists. There were few protests about the US using “disproportional” force, even though Afghanistan suffered way more casualties than the US military (and way more civilian casualties than Gaza). Newspapers did not plaster their pages with photos provided by Taliban operatives of dead or maimed children from Afghanistan.

The war crimes accusations against Israel should be understood for what they really are: a cynical attempt to delegitimize Israel under the façade of morality by nations and people who habitually turn a blind eye to real moral issues.

The same UN delegates and Hamas apologists who constantly put a microscope to Israel in hope of discovering an accusation that will stick pretend that they are unaware that Hamas is an organization with a stated goal of destroying a member nation of the UN. Such a goal is criminal by all measures of international law.

The same people who accuse Israel under the pretense of concern for civilians pretend that they are unaware of the tactic by which Hamas pursues its goal of destroying Israel: targeting innocent civilians in rocket attacks and suicide bombs. Targeting civilians is a war crime by all measures of international law.

The same people who accuse Israel under the pretense of concern for rules-of-war, pretend that they are unaware of the Geneva Convention, which proscribes all of the methods of Hamas, including these: fighting without a uniform to distinguish combatants from civilians; attacking from civilian locations, like schools, hospitals, and building, thereby creating human shields; and targeting civilians. Every one of these violations is a war crime by all measures of international law.

A full-scale investigation into Israel’s war efforts by the UN would be tainted with the same bias that the UN has demonstrated by authorizing such a study against Israel while ignoring the obvious crimes committed by Hamas, and remaining mute about numerous acts of mass killings committed by other countries. Still, this writer believes that an unbiased review would certainly reveal some real mistakes made by Israel in protocol and execution. Such findings are likely because Israel is an imperfect country with imperfect citizens; yet all countries, including the US, make many mistakes in war.

Nevertheless, a military should not be judged by their mistakes, which are inevitable in any major campaign, but by their overall performance on the battlefield. Richard Kemp, a retired British Colonel and military expert, reviewed and analyzed Israel’s tactics in the Gaza war. Speaking on the BBC, Colonel Kemp said there is "no time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and the deaths of innocent people than the Israel Defense Force" did in Gaza.

The Tragedy of Gaza

In September 2005, Israel made a unilateral decision to withdraw its citizens from Gaza. Gaza responded with a unilateral decision to fire thousands of rockets into Israel and ramp up suicide murders of Israeli citizens. Israel chose to risk its own security in pursuit of peace; Gaza chose to risk the security of both Gaza and Israeli citizens in pursuit of war.

Regrettably, Israel had no other option than to defend itself. People who understand this imperative are not insensitive to the tragedy of civilian deaths. However, they refuse to support the double standard that Israel must exercise indefinite restraint as its people withstand daily barrages of military attacks. In fact, they bemoan the unnecessary devastation and personal hardship inflicted upon Gaza civilians as an inevitable yet totally avoidable consequence of the egregious acts of terror by Hamas and its supporters, sworn to do whatever it takes to obliterate the Jewish State.

(c) copyright 2009 David J. Gilfix

The following video is worth watching:

British Colonel Kemp discusses Israel's Military Operation in Gaza at the UN

Speaking for UN Watch at an emergency debate about the UN Council on Human Rights's "Goldstone" report, British Colonel Kemp discusses the conduct of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) during Operation Cast Iron Lead in Gaza:

3 Songs by David Gilfix

2009-10-25T14:27:00.051-04:00

Here are 3 original songs. Hope you enjoy.

The Middle Man
by David Gilfix

Recorded live at The Me and Thee Coffeehouse in Marblehead, MA.

(c) copyright David Gilfix

December New York Morning

by David Gilfix

I tried to paint a picture-in-song of the New York City Village, where I lived in the 80's and early 90's.

vocal harmony - Julie Hardy
recorded/produced by Roger Christie at Black Cat Crossing Studio.

Sidewalks of papers and last nights coffee cups
Rustle about in icy wind, and
Wrapped-up in blankets asleep at my doorstep, their
Bottle is empty - and I walk soft around them, it’s

Just another December New York morning

The Sunday streets, so quiet it’s eerie,
And I drinking coffee, stroll on down 6th Street
Past Indian restaurants to Moiches Bakery.

    Now those years they have gone,
    And like an old song that you never turn on
    I stayed away,
    But sometimes that melody plays, and
    Even today I know it’s
    Always been part of me.

The Polish waitress scribbles my order, the
Times music section is spread ‘cross my table,
I’m reading about concerts at Avery Fisher
“The technique was perfect, the style was awful,” it’s

Just another December New York morning

The snow falls soft against my window,
The challah French toast and the murmur of people,
She whispers him something and now he’s smiling.

A homeless old man with ten dogs beside him
Sifts through the garbage, in the village he’s legend,
The dogs are his family and they will protect him
And as I pass the snow keeps falling, it’s

Just another December New York morning

The all-night cigar shop is open for magazines,
The places to travel look so bright today,
When on my shoulder I dream her hand on me,
I turn and look – but the dream’s gone away.

    Now those years they have gone,
    And like an old song that you never turn on
    I stayed away,
    But sometimes that melody plays, and
    Even today I know it’s
    Always been part of me.

(c) copyright David Gilfix

Jennifer
by David Gilfix

vocal harmony, Hal Katzman
recorded/produced by Roger Christie at Black Cat Crossing Studio.

Jennifer, you
Always do
What your heart believes,
You go your way
Every day,
Only you can see.

I wonder why
You would try
After all this time,
You never pour
‘Til you’re sure
That you like the wine.

Jennifer now
Tell me how
I can find my way,
Through all the screens
To your dreams
That you hide away.

You, like the wind,
Have always been
Someplace by the sea,
You take your time,
Like good wine,
Like a symphony.

(c) copyright David Gilfix

Smart Boards and Smart Students by David Gilfix

2009-09-28T23:37:00.051-04:00

So, what is the toughest challenge facing today’s public school educators? Is it to help kids acquire as much information as possible, or to teach them how to think deeply about a single topic? Neither. The toughest challenge is to keep kids focused on the lesson. Without that, they might as well be home watching television.

Which brings us to Smart Boards.

Smart Boards are replacing the old fashioned blackboards in the classroom, and everybody’s happy about it (and there’s nothing you can do about it, even if you’re not). In case you don’t have school-age children or haven’t stepped into a suburban classroom lately, Smart Boards are basically giant touch screen computers onto which you can either write directly or upload text and graphics via computer.

Here’s why everybody is happy:

First, the students: They are happy about Smart Boards because they love staring at a screen. On average, they spend three hours a day watching television. 68% of them have a television in their bedrooms, and 63% of them are in families that keep the television on even during dinner, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation research. When they’re not watching television, they’re finding other exciting ways to stare at a screen, such as surfing the internet – with long stops on Facebook, the Wii, the Nintendo DS, and of course video games. According to David Walsh, Ph.D., President of the National Institute on Media and the Family, 96% of American boys play video games for 13 hours per week, and 78% of girls play video games for 5 hours per week. Staring at a screen is their favorite thing to do, so they’re happy.

Second, the teachers: They are happy because Smart Boards greatly reduce their workload (more about that later) and because students love to stare at a screen and don’t want to look at teachers for more than a few minutes. And it’s not the teachers’ fault; the kids have lots of practice staring at a screen for hours on end (perhaps I mentioned that already). And kids have very little practice paying attention to a real live person. Additionally, the Smart Board does make a wonderful interactive tool. For example, if the class is about Van Gogh, you can show photographs of paintings about Van Gogh on a Smart Board, which might otherwise require students to open up a book.

Third, the administrators: They are happy about Smart Boards because students are happy (because they get to stare at a screen), and because teachers are happy (because students are happy). Also, Smart Boards are the way of the future, and administrators need to be in on technological innovations that advance the cause of education.

So everybody is gaga over the new Smart Boards, which cost somewhere between $2000 and $5000 for each classroom and will probably be replaced in a few years with new and improved Smart Boards that will also cost $2000 to $5000. The total cost for a school to put Smart Boards into every classroom could pay for a few extra teachers, but nobody wants to even look at new teachers when there are Smart Boards.

And to be honest, Smart Boards aren’t really that bad.

In defense of teachers, of which I am one, as well as administrators, whose job is way too stressful for me, there are important benefits to Smart Boards. They are very easy to use and much clearer than old-fashioned overhead projectors. The Smart Board can utilize just about any good educational software on its large screen, providing students with interactive problem-solving games that give immediate feedback about their decisions. A teacher or student can write directly on a Smart Board screen (using what else but a “magic crayon”) and then move the placement of their writing onto other parts of the screen; lists can be manipulated into different orders. Homework sheets, photographs, and book pages can be scanned and filed on Smart Boards with ease. In fact, Smart Boards makes it possible to save entire lesson plans and file them for future years, greatly reducing teachers’ workload. Smart Boards are so versatile that they practically render both the blackboard and the overhead projector obsolete.

If you still aren’t getting why the Smart Board is the greatest thing since sliced bread, here is the entire technological history of education in one breath. Ready? (Inhale): From oral history to cave drawings to papyrus to wax tablets to parchment to paper to printing press to blackboards to overhead projectors to computers, videos, DVDs … to SMART BOARDS!

OK, back to the students: In their defense, they have inherited a culture of television, computers, and gadgets that has encouraged unrestrained screen-viewing. If students now learn differently because of their experiences in today’s culture, it is not their fault.

Indeed, the Smart Board is public education’s answer to three important needs: 1) for students to stare at a screen (perhaps I already mentioned that), 2) for teachers to own an easy all-in-one blackboard/video screen/computer-integrated system that simplifies their job, and 3) for schools to provide students with more; more information about more topics, with way more pizzazz more easily than ever. The Smart Board provides instant access to videos, photographs, interactive charts, music, speeches, and more!

But does the Smart Board make students smarter?

In the national bestseller, The Dumbest Generation, Emory University English professor, Mark Bauerlein, provides a compelling research-based argument that, despite all its promise, technology has not produced noticeable gains in students’ reading or writing skills or in their general knowledge about civics, history, or American or world cultures. The sciences, too, have not seen noticeable gains. Bauerlein cites statistics from The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which show physics scores actually declining since 1996, while math scores among 12th graders not improving since 1978 even though three times as many students take calculus. Bauerlein asserts “instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.” Bauerlein does not argue against the inclusion of technology into the curriculum, but rather in favor of examining the real overall impact of technology on learning.

As someone who is statistically middle-aged, I was of course taught on the old-fashioned stupid board, aka the blackboard, and I remember clearly a time when school libraries were filled with books rather than computers. I also remember how everyone naively prognosticated that computers would solve our national educational challenges.

Like many people, I can look back and remember one particular teacher who inspired life long curiosity and excitement about learning. For me, it was my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Daley, a man who genuinely loved the topics he taught. When he discussed ancient Greece or ancient Rome, Mr. Daley presented vivid, stimulating images of these civilizations, not with movies or photographs but with words -- his words, based on his own research and understanding. His classes used few visual aids and little pizzazz except the most important of all – his real live enthusiasm. This was before the days of computers, videos, or Smart Boards, and yet, to this day, I can still remember the talks and discussion we had in his class

Mr. Daley has been a model for me as a teacher. He not only loved teaching and cared about his student, but he also loved learning, thinking, discussing, analyzing, differentiating, and provoking students to reexamine their assumptions. He inspired students to learn because he loved learning.

If Mr. Daley were teaching today, I am sure that he would be using the Smart Board; he would understand the imperative of using today’s technology in today’s classroom (besides, why use an overhead projector if you have a better choice?). I am sure he would still be a great teacher and that students would still learn a lot in his classes.

But they would not have learned as much from him as we did long ago.

Sometimes less really is more. My guess is that Mr. Daley would have discovered, as Mark Bauerlein writes, that the overall influence of technology on learning might be negative. Based on my experience as a passionate student and now passionate teacher, I have observed the following:

Rather than teaching students to remember more, by providing more information and more pictures, technology often suppresses students’ abilities to conjure up their own mental pictures based on the spoken words.

Rather than encouraging students to analyze and think deeply, technology often encourages surface thinking, like a rock skimming over the water from one topic to another.

Rather than enhancing communication skills, technology sometimes disenables the development of the highest verbal and written communication by allowing students to rely on photographs and videos.

Rather than stimulating students’ interests by providing information about many subjects, technology often overloads and overwhelms students with too much information, thereby killing their personal interests.

A recent article in the New Haven Register written by Sarah Peck, which discusses the incorporation of Smart Boards into the New Haven public schools, includes the following schoolteacher quotes:

• “Think of it as Wii for the classroom”

• “We’re in competition with video games, and it’s very difficult to compete.”

• “Once you start teaching with it, you can’t go without it.”

And so it goes. Everybody loves the Smart Board. The challenge for us teachers will be to moderate its use (better than students moderate their use of screen viewing toys) so that we can still derive all the benefits for which it was designed without sacrificing the Mr. Daley approach to teaching. Can we?

In my school, there are many excellent teachers, including a few who are probably in the same league as Mr. Daley. They, like the administrators, want to foster an approach that best promotes learning among students of this day and culture, and the Smart Board is so exceptional that it’s hard not to get caught up in all the enthusiasm. Music teachers always get everything last, but eventually I will receive one. I am optimistic that it will enhance my teaching, reduce my workload, and maybe even help my students stay focused.

But will it make them smarter?

Old Yeller and the Rabbi (and the Television) by David Gilfix

2009-09-08T21:14:00.015-04:00

I can’t get my daughters to watch Old Yeller.   It’s not that I haven’t tried; I was so doggone excited about sharing the quintessential dog movie of my childhood that I was singing the tune for days before renting the DVD. “Here Yeller, come back Yeller, best doggone dog in the West.” (Dad, shhhhh, I’m trying to read).   The girls didn’t decline my movie invitation because Old Yeller is basically a boy’s story or because it reinforces Disney’s take on traditional American western values (come on, they’re only nine!).   I can’t even blame myself, even though, in a moment of weakness, I divulged the poignant, powerful, heart rendering ending where Travis shoots his rabies-inflicted dog to end the suffering, and in making that painful-yet-noble decision he takes a giant step towards adulthood.   It’s none of that.

I blame the Rabbi.

You see, when my daughters were young we had a wonderful Shabbat meal with a local Chassidic Rabbi, and somewhere in the conversation he shared with us some parenting advice.   Fifty percent of parenting involves turning off the television. The other 50%, he added, is what you do once the television is off.

Now to be honest, his opinion isn’t radically different from the way my wife and I view parenting.   We want our children to develop mostly in an environment that supports our own ethical beliefs and values, certainly not to be mostly in an environment that was antithetical to those values. But television is just that. Most television shows involve petty, shallow, superficial, bratty, selfish, nasty characters struggling with their petty, shallow, superficial, bratty, selfish, nasty problems.

However, I still wasn’t convinced about the Rabbi’s “fifty percent” figure. Fifty percent is a math term, so I decided to examine his statement as a simple math problem. Ready?   Here we go.

For starters, according to pediatric researchers at the University of Washington, 90% of all children watch television for more than 90 minutes per day by the age of 2. Even worse, the American Academy of Pediatrics believes the average two-year-old watches a screen (TV, computers, and/or devices like the Wii and the Nintendo DS), for over two hours per day. Average television viewing among all ages in childhood is 3 hours per day.   (I’ll spare you the bad news about the amount of overall screen time in which most kids engage).

Three hours per day comes to 1095 hours per year. Meanwhile, if we assume a 6-hour school day and zero student absenteeism throughout a 180-day school year, then a student only attends school for a total 1080 hours, amazingly less than the 1095 hours in front of the television. In fact, my calculation is unreasonably biased towards children’s school-time, because it does not consider the fact that sick children usually stay out of school but rarely stay away from television.

Here’s another way to conceptualize the 3-hour daily television viewing. Let’s say that on average a child sleeps for 9.5 hours per day and is in school for six. Perhaps 1.5 hours are spent getting ready for and traveling to school, and another 1.5 hours are spent at breakfast and dinner combined (lunch is on “school” time).   Let’s further assume the child does homework for an hour a day. Altogether, that accounts for 18.5 hours. That means that of the remaining 5.5 hours, three of them (more than half) are spent in front of the television.

The Rabbi’s “fifty percent” comment no longer sounds so outlandish. He certainly knows his math.

But wait! In the true Talmudic tradition of my brilliant ancestors, it is necessary to dissect at least one key word. (Incidentally, all Jews have ancestors who were brilliant Talmudic scholars who didn’t watch television). The key word is “parenting.” In my humble opinion, parenting involves three important responsibilities: 1) Keeping a child safe, healthy, and feeling loved 2) Educating 3) Bestowing one’s values, ethics, and heritage.   If you disagree with these concepts then the rest of the article should be useless for you. Go turn on the television.

Let’s begin with “educating.” In a Boston Globe article by Barbara Meltz about a University of Washington study, parents cited “educational value,” as their reason for allowing children to watch television. Unfortunately, these parents confuse educating with accumulating knowledge. Even if their children only watch so-called educational television (and statistically we know this rarely happens), at best their children would gain a little extra information about the world. However, real education involves discovering, differentiating, analyzing, conceptualizing, prioritizing, planning, evaluating, and creating -- in other words, active learning. Television is completely passive and involves none of those activities.

Meltz goes on to discuss evidence that staring at a screen rather than interacting with the natural environment has a negative impact on a child’s cognitive development. Andrew Meltzoff, a developmental psychologist says that “…early viewing puts children on a trajectory that places them at high risk of attention deficit disorder, diminished reading ability, and obesity.”.

A child watching television is certainly safe - she won’t be run over by a car, and she is certainly loved, but she is also mostly likely ignored, and, believe it or not, risking her health.

The National Institute on Media and the Family website lists several studies by academic and medical institutions that correlate television viewing time to childhood obesity, lower cardio respiratory endurance, and low bone density. Additional studies conclude that reducing television watching correlated with preventing obesity. A recent study by the Journal of Pediatrics revealed that 9% of all US children (21 million) have deficient levels of vitamin D, as reported by Rob Stein of the Washington Post.   Among the causes were “…children spending more time watching television and playing video games instead of going outside.”

OK, back to Old Yeller. One of my favorite scenes is when Travis gazes in wonderment at his natural surroundings during a hunting trip. We, the viewers, see Travis’ perception of this magnificent wildlife as shot by Walt Disney (and nobody could film the natural world like Disney). But my children won’t watch it.

And I can’t totally blame the Rabbi.   I blame ourselves; it’s because we’re average.

You see, I know that we’re average parents, with average skills for regulating our children’s television viewing and bestowing our values. I know that if we made television a part of our children’s lives with the intention of only watching in moderation or only watching so-called, misnamed “educational” shows, we would fail – just like other average parents whose children now watch 3 hours a day. So we have raised our children with almost no television. We never use television as a reward for completing homework or as a relaxation treat during the weekends. There are exceptions of course, such as when the real baseball season begins in October with the playoffs and we commence our annual ritual of hating the Yankees with every fiber of our being.

The Rabbi’s wife told me a story that a babysitter, after being informed that they owned no television, asked her, “but then what will the children do?”

Indeed, I have noticed that a common characteristic of children who don’t watch television is that they tend not to get bored. Rather than watch television, they take the initiative to do more of the things we used to associate with childhood before the advent of cable and 200 crystal clear stations where something is always “on”. My daughters, for example, make up games, climb trees, run around outside, get dirty, ride their bikes, use their pogo sticks, practice gymnastics, hunt for caterpillars, draw pictures, write stories, read (I’m one of those rare parents who tries to get his children to read less), play board games, fight, create crazy cooking recipes, argue, practice violin, write songs on the piano, play with their friends, play with their dolls, make up plays, do their homework, collect leaves, and on-and-on. They’re not “better” than other girls; they’re just normal, and normal is exactly the way we want them to be.

Since my daughters were not raised with television, they never developed the time honored American pastime of staring vacantly at a screen for hours on end. In fact, it bores them, and they can’t understand why anyone (including me) would enjoy this unbearable art of do-nothingness. When I watch TV, one of them invariably tries to convince me to do something else (gee, can’t a guy enjoy just a little mayhem and murder after a hard day’s work?).

So in the end, I guess I can’t complain since they are a product of our own making, even though we'll probably never experience that blissful, bonding father/daughter Old Yeller moment. (Violinist, can you play the theme to Born Free?).

I tried one final time to convince my daughters to watch the wonderful Old Yeller scene of the magnificent wildlife, but one of them said, “Dad, why do we have to watch nature on television. Let’s go outside.”

Vamping about Musicby David Gilfix

2009-08-24T16:52:00.033-04:00

After leaving yet another concert early, I came up with a little chiasmus to explain why: Good artists use their instrumental technique to show off the music; mediocre artists use the music to show off their instrumental technique.

The guys were monster musicians: they could play anything, and they let me know it – every single piece. By the fourth piece I got bored and left.

Of course, certain music is created to show off the performer’s virtuosity, such as Van Halen’s “Eruptions” on guitar, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on banjo, and the “Orange Blossom Special” on fiddle. Such pieces exist in all styles of music, and they’re fun. However, most music was composed for musical purposes rather than to impress people about the performer’s skill.

Songwriting

A pig with lipstick is still a pig. Whoever coined that phrase should have been talking about song writing. Turn on the radio and listen to your local popular music station if you dare. Here’s what you will hear: great production, including vocals, instrumentals, rhythm sections, recording quality, and special effects. That’s the lipstick. Focus on the songs and usually you’ll hear a pig: inane lyrics, 5-note melodies that go nowhere, harmonic drivel.

But there is hope! While most of today’s songs might be lousy, you don’t have to listen to them. We live in an age where there is so much great music and so many great performers – in every style - that it’s a wonder why anyone wastes time listening to the pigs. My latest find, thanks to my Argentinean friend, Gabriella, are the following Latin musicians: from Brazil - Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso, considered the Brazilian Bob Dylan; from Argentina - Jorge Fandermole and Liliana Vitale; from Cuba - the pianist, Bebo Valdéz, and gypsy singer songwriter, Diego Jimenez Salazar (aka El Cigala). Gabriella describes Valdez and Cigala’s music as a “jewel,” “a mixture of tangos, and boleros with flamenco.”

Here is a very imperfect test to determine a good song: Take away the music and the lyrics should hold up on their own. Take away the lyrics and the music should hold up on its own. Put them together and both the lyrics and melody should enhance our perceptions of each other.

OK, I know there are scores of exceptions -- wonderful songs that succeed based on their lyrics or melody alone. However, most songs that have either inane, incomprehensible, or banal lyrics, or inane, incomprehensible, or banal melodies and harmonies are simply not good songs.

As Voltaire once said, anything that is too stupid to say is usually sung.

My advice

Here’s my own one word advice to high school students who tell me they want to go into music: “Don’t.”

Actually, that’s stretching the truth; I never give one word advice. I do say “don’t” to grab their attention. Then I tell them all the reasons they shouldn’t pursue music as a profession. I call this my “converting-to-Judaism” approach, akin to Rabbis traditionally turning away potential converts at least three times and then aggressively discouraging them – before proceeding with all the learnings.

You have to really, really want to go into music before making it a major lifestyle decision. From my observation, most university music professors rarely discuss the realities of a music career with students who are music “majors.” If they did, many students would switch majors, and more music professors would be out of a job.

And speaking of realities, according to a “60 Minutes” documentary, the president of Julliard Conservatory greeted freshmen one year with the following comment: “Look around you, ninety percent of the people you see will never earn a living as a performer.”

Less you think I am too negative, please note that I also tell potential music students reasons why music could be a wonderful, rewarding career for them. However, I usually include two pieces of advice: 1) don’t go into music unless you love teaching; most musicians make most of their income from teaching; 2) double major in the one practical field that you would consider if you ever tired of music; do that even if it takes an extra-year of college.

Listen up

Music that must be excessively loud to sound good is not good music.

Could it be that one of the legacies of late great guitarist/electric guitar inventor, Les Paul, is a generation with hearing loss? Today, as in my youth, teenage boys (and it’s usually boys) who believe that tolerating loud music in their rock group is macho are really confusing macho with ignorance – in this case about noise-induced hearing loss. If the loud music doesn’t bother them, it’s probably because they already suffer from permanent hearing damage.

Of course, it isn’t only boys who are at risk. According to researchers at the University of Florida, 17% of all children tested had some degree of hearing loss, which was likely due to exposure to excessive noise at an early age. A Lancet study conducted years ago also revealed that “significant hearing loss” was detected in students who had a history of attending popular music concerts. (Loud Music and Hearing Damage – Abelard)

In July 2009, ABC News ran a health story on hearing loss in which Steven Rauch, associate professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School, claimed that 15% of all children have hearing loss by late adolescence, and “… the obvious source is music.”

In fairness to Les Paul, the electric guitar and popular music concerts are only partially to blame. A more pervasive source of excessive-noise exposure among youths and adults are headphones, especially the tiny “ear buds” that fit inside the ear and connect to iPods or other portable media players. A study conducted by Australian researchers indicated “a quarter of iPod users between 18 and 54 years of age listened at volumes sufficient to cause hearing damage.” (Abelard).

The good news is that this is all preventable. Simply turn the music down, pull out the ear buds, and wear noise-reducing earplugs when necessary.

A local audiologist recently told me that most of the members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra wore special musician’s earplugs during rehearsals and performances. Isn’t it time that we required school band and orchestra students to do the same?

The Sounds of Silence

When I moved back to Boston from New York City, I was amazed that I could actually hear my own footsteps. I had forgotten what they sounded like.

My 25 All Time Favorite Albums by David Gilfix

2009-08-18T17:34:00.012-04:00

What are the albums that you have listened to most? Not the albums that you believe are the best artistically, but the ones that you have actually played over and over. I decided to determine my top 25 most listened to non-classical music albums as a fun exercise to see where my musical tastes gravitate most.

The first three choices are probably my three most listened to albums. The rest are in no particular order. Here’s the annotated list:

1 “Sergeant Pepper.” (Rolling Stone Magazine’s number 1 album of all time)

2 “Abbey Road.” The song cycle, which begins with You Never Give Me Your Money and ends with The End, is one of the true masterpieces of rock music.

3 All the Beatles Albums. Truth is, I’ve probably listened to every Beatle album more than any other album.

4 “Pete Seeger and Friends.” Includes Pete solo and with The Cathedral Singers, The Union Baptist Singers, Paul Winter, and more.

5 “Ray Charles Anthology.” I’d rather hear Ray sing almost anything than anyone else. My all-time favorite singer and an amazing keyboard player to boot.

6 “Introducing Reuven Gonzalez.” The great Cuban keyboard player who gained prominence in “The Buena Vista Club,” performing with other great Cuban musicians.

7 The Who, “Who’s Next.” Includes my choice for the greatest rock and roll song of all time: Baba O’Riley.

8 “Duke Ellington’s Greatest Hits.” I used to be anti greatest hit’s albums, until I discovered that sometimes the “greatest hits,” actually deserve their title.

9 “Woodstock.” As media plays up the significance of the 40th anniversary of this social musical milestone, I am reminded why I used to play this album over and over: Joe Cocker - Little Help from my Friends, Country Joe and The Fish - Feel Like I’m Fixen’ to Die Rag, Jimmi Hendrix – Star Spangled Banner, The Who – See Me, Feel Me, Richie Haven – Freedom, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young – Sweet Judy Blue Eye, and many more. Wow.

10 Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue.” The album that introduced many musicians, including me, to modal jazz. Incredible - like almost everything Miles did.

11 Tom Lehrer, “That was the year that Was.” Tom set the bar for funny, satirical songs, and nobody has ever taken it higher. Includes National Brotherhood Week, The Vatican Rag, Pollution, and New Math.

12 Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Time Out.” Brubeck’s exploration of complex meters includes Take Five, Blue Rondo a la Turk, and Kathy’s Waltz.

13 “Live Johnny Winter Band.” Recorded at the old Fillmore East, this is my favorite performance of raw, hard driving, gritty blues/rock guitar playing.

14 Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, Jake Hannah, “Entering Concord.”
Great jazz guitar playing. I got this as a high school graduation present and didn’t appreciate it until years later. In gratitude, it has become my standard high school graduation present.

15 “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1.” I don’t have the patience to sit through mediocre Bob Dylan songs, but his best songs are as good as they get.

16 “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” An amazing debut album.

17 Billy Joel, “Turnstiles.” Includes James, NY State of Mind, and Angry Young Man.

18 Charlie Byrd, “My Inspiration; Music From Brazil.” Includes Chuck Redd on Vibes and Scott Hamilton, Sax. Incredible.

19 “Songs of Leonard Cohen.” His debut album includes Suzanne, Sister’s of Mercy, and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.

20 Simon and Garfunkel, “Live in Central Park.” Includes several of their masterpieces. I predict that many of the Simon and Garfunkel songs will still be standards years from now.

21 Paul Simon, “Graceland.” So many artists did their best work early. Paul Simon is an exception; he just keeps developing, trying out new things. Still hard to believe it was from the composer of The Boxer.

22 “The Best of John Prine.” If you’ve never listened to John Prine start with this album. His best songs are as good as Bob Dylan’s.

23 Flor de Cana, “Dancing on The Wall * Bailando en la Murailla.” The Boston based Flor de Cana, which later regrouped as Sol Y Canto, was the group through which I first discovered Latin music. Fabulous rhythms, vocals, harmonies, and guitar playing.

24 “An Evening With John Denver.” OK, this is by far the most uncool album on my list, but these are great songs, great lyrics, great melodies, great singing. Denver was an extraordinary talent, and few people were better at writing simple songs that celebrated life.

25 Hank Jones, Piano and Charlie Hayden, Bass; “Steal Away.” The great jazz pianist and bass player collaborate to perform spirituals. This is my latest favorite. I can’t stop listening to it.

What are some of your all-time favorite albums? Please consider listing a few!

Remembering Janusz Korczak by David Gilfix

2009-08-09T21:01:00.009-04:00

Many years ago I wrote a play about the great Jewish/Polish orphanage director, Janusz Korczak, and it was ultimately produced in New York. The following is the introduction to the play:

If the value of a museum exhibition can be determined by its long-term impact, then the Ghetto Fighter’s Museum on Kibbutz Lohame Getaot in Israel was invaluable to me. It was at this museum in the early 1980s that I first learned about the Jewish/Polish orphanage director, Janusz Korczak. So powerful was this exhibit that I decided there and then to someday write a play about this man. I wanted to bring Korczak, his co-director Stefa Wilczynska, and the children they sought to protect back to life. I wanted to know them. And for me, the only possible way of doing this was in the form of a play.

Janusz Korczak, (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit) was a complicated yet brilliant, multi-faceted man. There was Korczak the author, whose witty novels, social satires, and children’s books were read across Europe. There was Korczak the doctor, whose research and publications in medical journals were instrumental towards major improvements to pediatrics in pre-World War II Poland. Most of all, there was Janusz Korczak the exceptional orphanage director.

Korczak established a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw in 1911 called the “Dom Sierot,” and together with Stefa Wilczynska, he ran it for more than thirty years. He also ran a Christian orphanage in Bielany and served on the Board of Directors of several other orphanages. Korczak’s revolutionary ideas about child development almost single handedly upgraded the orphanage institution in Poland. His theories about a child’s “right to respect” and “the dignity of the child” had enormous influence throughout Poland and Europe. Korczak’s Children’s Court, which became integral to the way he nurtured and governed children within his orphanage, is still studied today.

When Germany invaded Poland in World War II and forced a huge portion of the Jewish population including the Dom Sierot inside the Warsaw Ghetto, Korczak’s total energy was devoted to saving his orphans as well as other abandoned children. Had the horrible events of the Nazi occupation not transpired, Korczak would still be remembered as one of the great educational innovators and child advocates of the twentieth century. However, his courageous response to the events of the Holocaust established him as something even greater.

Korczak received multiple offers from well-meaning friends outside the Ghetto walls to be smuggled to freedom. He rejected all of them, for he would not abandon his children. On August 5th, 1942, Korczak, Stefa Wilczynska, and approximately 200 orphans were put on a train that would take them to their death in Treblinka. Immediately thereafter, the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters adopted a new battle cry: “Remember Korczak’s children!” He had become legend.

Today Janusz Korczak is a national hero in Poland. Israeli school children learn about his exploits. And in Poland, at the site of the former death camp in Treblinka, there are numerous plaques commemorating the countries from which people died. Only one mentions a person’s name. It says, “Janusz Korczak and the Children.”
______________________

Related links:
From Joop Beerding: The Netherlands Janusz Korczak Association
From Daniel L. Berek: "The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak," which contains the only English-language translation of "How to Love a Child"
Also from Daniel L. Berek, scans of Korczak books and memorabilia on his Flickr page (an amazing collection)

Joop Beerding and Daniel L. Berek's comments follow:

Thinking about Cronkite, Human Rights Organizations, and the Ideal of Impartialityby David Gilfix

2009-08-03T19:04:00.004-04:00

Cronkite understood that as a newsman he could never compromise his standards of accuracy and objectivity. He never pandered to ratings by presenting non-news as news. However, Cronkite operated in an era when there was very little competition. Internet news services today pull viewers from traditional news sources, which in turn have been replaced by deliberately non-objective news sources such as Fox, MSNBC, Huffington Post, FrontPageMag.Com, the Guardian (London), The Washington Times, and so on. The Cronkite era of journalism, like the traditional newspaper, might be on its way out.

Today, many people bestow the same trust and respect once reserved for traditional news organizations to human rights organizations like Amnesty International. But why should we believe that workers from these organizations could more accurately analyze, assess, or discern fact from fiction than trained journalists? Why should we assume them to be less subject to ideological or financial bias than reporters?

As an example, recently the Wall Street Journal reported that the NGO “Human Rights Watch” was fundraising in Saudi Arabia, a country with abysmal records for respecting freedom of religion, the rights of women, and the rights of gays. Yet, instead of focusing on conditions within Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch promised Saudi donors that their contributions would help “expose” Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza. One wonders how Human Rights Watch could know that there were Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza before it had conducted an investigation.

A similar pattern of selectively focusing on Israel is common among other human rights organizations. Perhaps the most glaring example involves the UN Council for Human Rights which, according to Hudson Institute Scholar Anne Bayefsky, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations than any other country. In fact, The U.N. Council for Human Rights has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than resolutions condemning all 191 U.N. member states combined. Are we really supposed to believe that Israel has committed more human rights violations than the sum total of 191 countries, including Sudan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Chechnya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, China, Cuba, and Afghanistan?

What has happened to the ideal of impartiality? Certainly, news and human rights organizations were never free from bias. But there was an ideal of impartiality, symbolized by Walter Cronkite, towards which the most respected information-gathering organizations carefully aimed. Perhaps part of our sorrow about Cronkite’s passing involves our re-embracement of that ideal, and an awareness of how much it has been trampled.

The Sin of Racial Profilingby David Gilfix

2009-07-28T14:09:00.009-04:00

I have spent way too much time corresponding with people about the Gate’s/Crowley episode. But since I got the ball rolling with my recent article, I wanted to present the side my article didn’t address.

In his freshman year in college in Ohio, a Puerto Rican friend was stopped by police outside a small-town bar, put in the local jail, and not bailed out until the next morning by the college Dean (who happened to be too busy to go to the police station that evening). No charges were filed and no apology was given. An Asian friend was stopped and hassled by police outside a subway station in New York where he was waiting to pick-up his daughter. A Moslem friend was questioned so suspiciously at Logan Airport that he now avoids air travel. An African-American friend was stopped numerous times; in fact, it seems like every African-American that I know has a story about being stopped and treated like a criminal by police.

Which brings us back to the Gates/Crowley episode. What really happened in that episode really does matter, and a fair review of the facts shows no evidence of racism - which is why I wrote the previous article. I enjoy provoking people to view subjects outside of their particular ideological lenses. But perhaps the most important lens we (including yours truly) should be looking through is the one worn by people who fear racial profiling.

Even if the Gates arrest wasn’t associated with racial profiling, there is potential now – perhaps like no time I can remember - to develop more sensitivity to the sin of profiling. This is a major problem that contradicts the highest ideals of our country and demeans the daily experiences of far too many people.

I hope that the upcoming beer between Obama, Crowley, and Gates will bring about reconciliation and even three-way apologies. My only criticism about the beer-together is their choices of brands: Why no Sam Adams?