The Chart

Okay, let's take a look at this chart:

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

 

 

First of all, take a careful look at those countries that are ranked higher than the U.S.  They are among the most racially homogeneous societies in the world.  Many of them plan on staying that way, with little immigration, the imposition of bars against acquiring citizenship, and, in some cases, outright xenophobia.  Going down the list, we find a predominance of nations like Finland, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Slovak Republic, Norway, Luxembourg.  Most of these are nations that are small in population as well as tending to be homogeneous in nature, and, dare we say it, extremely white.  So white, in fact, that for this observer at least, they elicit thoughts of claims of Nordic and Teutonic superiority which, since the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name a little while back, are no longer uttered in polite company.
     Outside of Northern Europe (with the exception of those darned socialist French), other locations given high rankings tend to be either in Asia or such outposts of the old British Empire as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Note, too, that with regard to Asia, such island provinces as Hong Kong and Macao appear.  Since 2003, of course, as the "economic tigers" have allocated more and more of their resources to improving education, other Asian locales have joined the higher rankings.
    
Have standards declined in U.S. public schools?  Well, that depends a great deal on which public schools we are looking at, doesn't it?  If we are looking at the public schools in Scarsdale, let's say, we will get a very different picture than we will if we look at public schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant or East New York.  Has anyone thought to, just out of curiosity, compare the results of kids in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor with those of kids in Finland? There are no doubt many who look at the rankings and mindlessly conclude that what we are seeing is clear evidence of the racial superiority of whites and Asians.  If school performance were just about race, however, we might expect that whites performed uniformly well on standardized tests.  What one actually finds is that there is a wide spread between the performance of white students that is largely dependent on income.  In other words, some are more equal than others.  To cite just one example from a voluminous literature on this subject, take a look at the observations of one school administrator in Westchester:

The three top-spending districts (on a gross basis)—Briarcliff ($24,738), North Salem ($24,486), and Bronxville ($24,068)—each spend approximately $10,000 more per pupil than Yonkers ($14,170), Port Chester ($14,461), and Mount Vernon ($14,955). The disparity between instructional expenditures is even more profound. Although they serve roughly the same size student populations, Rye ($12,531) spends about 50 percent more on per-pupil instruction than Port Chester ($8,299). “I can’t compete on a per-capita spending level,” says Charles Coletti, school superintendent of Port Chester. “Financial comparisons don’t work for my district. They never have, and they never will.**

**http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/March-2006/Our-Smartest-Public-High-School-Report-Card/

None of us is immune to the tsk-tsking about declining standards.  There was never a time in history when the observation was not made that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, to coin a phrase.  There are probably very few of us who have not drawn dark conclusions from charts such as the one presented here.  On the other hand, while it is certainly fair to conclude that certain standards (my favorite is handwriting) have declined, if we don't keep in mind that statistics often lie and deceive, we will become party to a campaign that, rather than being motivated by a desire to improve American education is actually motivated to dismantle our public school system.  If anything, what the charts have to teach us is that funding for American schools should be standardized.  That is the real way to ensure that no child is left behind.

The Right Wing Campaign Against Public Education

First, let's look at a typical report on the relative success among a select group of nations with regard to student performance in mathematics.  (Although the scores go back to 2003, later assessments show basically the same results.  Since results in reading and science are comparable, in the interest of brevity and for the purpose of this post, math results will suffice.)

International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds

More than 250,000 15-year old students from 41 countries participated in the assessment. The countries included all major industrialized nations (results for Britain were not available) and 11 other nations that chose to participate. The test scores are from 2003.

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

1. Because data are based on samples, it is not possible to report exact rank order positions for countries. However, it is possible to report the range of rank order positions within which the country mean lies with 95% likelihood.

2. Rank based on top two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

3. Rank based on lowest two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD PISA (Program for Student Assessment) 2003 database

Read more: International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html#ixzz1vlE0xEI4

Web site:  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html
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We've all seen this or similar charts.  We have in fact been bombarded with such statistics, the publication and announcement of which is inevitably accompanied by hand wringing, hair pulling and keening over the terrible condition of U.S. schools.  "Why," the rhetoric goes, "is the most powerful nation in the world faring so badly?"   Before analyzing the chart above, let us keep in mind that two prominent figures emerged in recent years to spearhead the attack on public education in this country--Milton Friedman and Michelle Rhee.  Along with numerous other true believers, they became the poster children for an attack which, as we shall see, has been only tangentially, if at all, focused on what ails our schools but very interested in destroying the remnants of a once powerful union movement in the United states.  Thus Friedman and Rhee's answer to the puzzle is that what is wrong with the schools are the teachers.  It is hard to tell whether the better literary reference here is to George Orwell or Lewis Carroll, but forced to come up with an explanation for the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression after thirty years of having its way with the American economy, the right wing would point to the chart above and say, "None of this would have happened had it not been for the teachers (or, more to the point, the fact that teachers are unionized and actually have [defined benefit!] pensions)."  Why is the U.S. ranked between Latvia and Russia in the above rankings?  Because those benighted teachers have been leaning on their shovels, collecting enormous pensions and moreover setting a terrible example for working class Americans who, dating back to Ronald Reagan's busting of the Air Traffic Controllers Union, been gradually deprived of their unions and such outrageous benefits as health plans and pensions.  No hedge fund and derivatives traders have been tried in our courts after bankrupting the world economy, but in the court of public opinion, teachers are now Public Enemy No. 1 (although they may be in a narrow tie for that distinction with irresponsible Black men and women who were bilked out of their savings by being lured into "no-doc" mortgages in an attempt to find adequate housing).   From New Jersey's Governor Christie to Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, across the nation, the cry has gone out, "Get those damned teachers!"

Friedman, coming out of the Rockefeller haunt at the University of Chicago, breeding ground for the group of economists who wished to lobotomize the U.S. in an effort to make them forget the New Deal and embrace nineteenth century laissez-faire economics as well as the so-called neo-liberal cabal that sees as its mission the making of a world safe for the U.S. and Israel, went to his deathbed bemoaning the fact that, try as he could, he had failed to destroy teachers' unions and privatize American schools.

Michelle Rhee, a Korean-American capitalizing on the perception that Asian culture has some magic potion* they feed to their kids to make them excel in school, proceeded to institute a reign of terror in the Washington, D.C. school system for teachers she characterized as poor performers. Ms. Rhee, catching the scent of a career opportunity, has gone on to recreate herself as a guru for the whole litany of right wing prescriptions for reinventing education in America--vouchers, charter schools, teaching to the test, merit pay, doing away with tenure, and so on.  It is a prescription for basically complete privatization and the utilization of techniques in schools taken from the pages of the kind of corporate manuals that make chicken farming so attractive a sector of the growing unregulated, non-union U.S. economy. 
     *(After all, statistics do not lie. The student population at New York's Stuyvesant High School, probably the toughest ticket for admission to an elite public school in the nation, is now 75% Asian. And no one is readier to believe in the genetic intellectual superiority of Asians than these kids. If anyone needs further examples of Asian superiority, take a look at enrollment figures at MIT or a host of other prestigious U.S. schools.  Few Americans truly understand the Asian "secret."  Having visited many schools throughout Asia, I can testify to the fact that their superior results have almost nothing to do with the quality of their teachers or even the educational material in their schools, both of which suffer by comparison with the best that the U.S. has to offer.  It has a lot to do with family pride and face and far more days and hours spent in school supplemented by countless prep academies given the job of sharpening skills and getting their students into the best high schools, colleges and universities.  Few if any U.S. children would tolerate the regimen imposed on kids throughout Asia.)

Historically, over the latter half of the twentieth century, no group was more critical of the short-comings of American education than the left.  Their critique, however, centered not on the failings of teachers but rather on the failings of a system that had basically turned its back on the millions of black and brown and poor kids who, in many of the nation's cities, left behind in the dust of white flight to the suburbs, were relegated to schools that were grossly underfunded to meet their needs.  In fact, many of the most severe critics of urban public schools were the very teachers working within them.  This often proved to be so much the case, that conservative union leaders like the late Al Shanker, (as well as his hand-picked successors), had to take on the usual role of an American labor leader, that of gatekeeper, doing his best to tamp down the "radicals" within his rank and file.  Like so many other American movements, the movement within the unions to take a more aggressive stance in behalf of their young charges ran into a wall in 1968.  That was the year a three-month long teachers' strike grew out of another Rockefeller inspiration.  Former JFK cabinet member, McGeorge Bundy, (ever alert to opportunities for pacification programs) and his Ford Foundation issued a report on Community Control of the Schools.  What was a barely disguised effort to entrench segregation in Northern schools was seen as an opportunity for the ambitious within many of the target communities and an excuse to purge white teachers among the many already employed as teachers in those communities.  The schools, race relations, teachers' unions, the public image of school teachers and lot more would never be the same after that long and ugly strike.

And, in an effort to give a full picture, some time should be taken to address one other player in the great school debate as we have seen it play out over the last fifty years.  In effect transcending the differences between right wing and left wing critiques of our schools, this third group devoted itself to pointing out to an innocent American public that, wholesome as their faith in the power of education might be, it was, at bottom irrelevant as a determinant for success or even social mobility.  What mattered far more was class.*  This, of course, is the nasty little secret hidden under the cover of the Norman Rockwell quilt stitched on the Great American Dream Machine.  The implications of this school of thought are enormous.  If true, then spending more money on what were once called "ghetto schools" was just throwing good money after bad.  Judged by cold statistics, all of those bleeding hearts (another popular phrase of the period) were just wasting their time.

     *(No surprise, Christopher Jencks, the leading proponent of this analysis, was a product of Exeter, Harvard and the London School of Economics.  He was, and still is, a leading figure among that group of intellectuals given the assignment of responding to left wing (Marxist) analyses.  Doling out such assignments to truly loyal Americans is one of the major roles of our elite universities, often with considerable help from such governmental organizations as you can probably imagine and need not be listed here.) 

     To some extent, this argument had some weight for both right and left wing educational critics.  Certainly the left, schooled in the literature of class warfare, had to admit that there was some merit to this viewpoint.  It seemed a rather depressing and demoralizing turn in the pedagogical literature--unless all that was being offered was an academic version of "the poor shall always be with us."   The only problem was that no one seemed prepared to put the theory to the ultimate test by actually funding schools for poor kids at the same level their brother and sister American kids enjoyed in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor. 

Next: A Close Look at The Chart 

Plastics, Benjamin, Plastics

A recent involvement in archiving the cache of photographs that my brothers and I discovered in the basement of our late father has had several unanticipated consequences.  

      A preoccupation with the past and, in particular, one's family ancestry seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment.  Given the many unpleasant realities that the post-twentieth century world has given us, this is probably to be expected.  Then, too, the baby boomer generation, now well into its dotage, and having the leisure and affluence to indulge its whims, has reached a stage where reflection upon its past translates into such phenomena as the success of on-line web sites for exploring one's ancestry or the popularity of "Skip" Gates' PBS specials exploring the DNA trail of various celebrities.   There are no doubt countless other explanations for what is going on--more of us are college educated, we are often the children and the grandchildren of immigrants with a sense of having "arrived" or just old-fashioned nostalgia.

     In the process of poring over hundreds of old photos, however, I gradually became aware that my reaction to the images they contained had a certain leitmotif.  I began to sense a certain calm that the images projected.  Partly, this may have been due to the fact that one organizing principle that I employed when assembling the photos into small journals or scrap books was to restrict my selection to only black and white or, if they were even older, sepia samples.   Now, without a long digression on the subject of the power black and white photography (including film) has as we are now well into a technicolor world, I began to realize just how important my editorial decision was.  Included in the family collection, there were obviously many color pictures taken since color photography had begun to replace black and white photography as the preferred modality for family snapshots, a quantum leap that had begun in the late 1950s.  Many, if not most, of the color photos seemed to have faded and lost their resolution with the passing years.  They often had an orange cast that I some time ago came to associate with prints of feature films made in the 1960s, a decade in which orange seemed to dominate the palette.  Surprisingly, the old black and white photos have often held up a lot better than the color photos that came to replace them in most family albums.  Perhaps the difference can best be summed up by asking the reader to mentally compare the impact made by a Cartier-Bresson or Capra print to that made by a video tape of a B movie photographed in color during the 1960s.  In any case, I stayed in my black and white realm, postponing the time when perhaps some over-arching insight would allow me to treat all those color images.

   

     As I was looking at one cousin's photo, I became aware of the specific impact that the backgrounds in many of the older photographs was having upon me.  Completely absent from the older photos was a common element in photos of more recent vintage--plastic.  Instead, it was a world in which wood and brick, glass, stone and iron dominated.  Even the clothing worn continues to project the aura of natural substances--of cotton and wool rather than of the still emerging technical marvels of nylon and polyester. 

       Of course, there are still residential areas in which natural materials are almost exclusively utilized, but these tend to be in the more affluent districts, segregated from commercial zones.  For most of us, plastic awnings, signage and building materials are all around us.  We are literally drowning in plastic.  This is not just an aesthetic concern.  The recently broadcast PBS documentary, Bag It!, frighteningly illustrates the extent to which just one plastic item, the common grocery store bag, used by the billions, has come to represent a clear and present danger to our environment, particularly in our oceans.   That danger, it appears, only worsens as plastic breaks down.  Plastic is biodegradable.  Though slow to break down, once it does, the small globules of the substance come to resemble plankton and other sea life whereupon, to their peril, it is ingested by larger animals. 

,      There are some who might accuse me of being a victim of nostalgia, of being psychologically predisposed to a past world that, photographed in black and white, was never really as uncluttered and "pure" as the impression those pictures create.   While there may be an element of that at work, nevertheless, when I look back at images from the pre-plastic world we once had, I cannot shake the conviction that steps must be taken to restore our quality of life and to protect the environment.  (I have already taken to bringing my own net bag to the supermarket and turning down their plastic bags, for one.)  Certainly, greater regulation of disposable plastic must be instituted.  And plastic should be used a lot less to begin with.  My own niche cause, however, is to find some remedy for the use of plastic in signage and building exteriors.  Do a mental exercise in your own community.  Study the landscape and then try to imagine how the place would look if all of that plastic were removed.   Except for a handful of individuals who find in scenes such as the one below a perverse satisfaction in that what is at work is unfettered freedom of expression, a kind of avant-garde, felicitous alternative to order and proportion, most of us I am convinced would breathe a welcome sign of relief were all the plastic and the neon that often accompanies it to disappear. 

      One solution would be to prohibit the use of plastic or at least to oblige builders and architects to submit to some benevolent local branch of government an application for its appopriate use.  An alternative might be to declare an amnesty, something akin to the measures taken to get individuals to turn in illegally owned guns; in other words, pay people to take down the plastic and return to the days of wood and paint and glass. 

     While, unfortunately, unlike Miniver Cheevy, I appear not to be growing lean, I obviously join him in having many reasons for assailing the seasons.  I have in these posts written of my disdain for, among other things, the automobile, skyscrapers and the saturation of the earth in ammonium nitrate in the name of encouraging its further overcrowding. 

     In the end, I maintain faith in the notion that one day mankind will come to its senses and abandon its gravely flawed technological sorcery for a regimen that truly nourishes body and soul.

   

      

Trotsky's Ghost: Part Three

It now seems fairly certain that all ensuing crises will be global in nature.  Due to the world-wide interlocking directorate that exists under the ever-frailer aegis of the U.S. dollar, it would be difficult to contain a crisis within the borders of a single nation.  Even China, with its command economy, will be hard pressed to shield itself from an economic epidemic beyond its borders so long as it relies so heavily on exports to other nations.  The economic fates of the Western hemisphere and Europe are intertwined.  Even sub-Saharan Africa, desperately struggling with the colonial "inheritance" left behind by its former European masters, will certainly not be immune.

     All this brings to mind the novel St. Petersburg written by the Russian novelist Andrei Bely in 1916, on the eve of the Russian revolution.  The novel's device is to place a time bomb in the home of a Russian aristocrat early on.  Through all of its remaining pages, the reader can hear that bomb ticking away.  The plot device serves, of course, as a metaphor for the conditions that led to the real explosions that would be set off in the aftermath of World War I. 
     The new millenium, of course, has brought us nothing so much as a sharpened awareness that we are not living with just one ticking time bomb, but three.  At the moment the economic crisis is on the front pages, but embedded under a layer or two of denial are two crises that may well explode before we ever reach a resolution of our economic troubles, namely the environmental crisis and, third, the perpetual risk that men in power will resort to the time-worn solution for getting out of a jam, the use of real rather than metaphoric bombs.  (Viewers of PBS's current Masterpiece Theater offering, titled Birdsong, have been exposed to the devastating loss of life that took place during World War I.  Viewers who are students of the history will understand that that was precisely the point.) 
     The Russians, though no longer ruled by communist commissars, are clearly still beyond the pale.  Their internet news service, RT.com, gives us daily reminders of the build-up of military forces in the Persian Gulf and their attitude toward U.S. missile deployments in Eastern Europe becomes daily more belligerent.  Echoes of the wacky, millennial doomsday prognostications that have long predicted a global cataclysm in 2012 can be found everywhere in the media.  In truth, there is a frightening suspicion that, ironically, the risk of war is now greater than it ever was during the heat of the nominally cold war.
    In my previous post, I chided Paul Krugman for not taking his analysis to the next level and flat out acknowledging that Western policy makers are not merely avoiding taking the measures necessary for at least ameliorating the economic crisis, but are in fact determined to exacerbate it.  There is, however, an even deeper layer of the onion to be peeled away.  If, as I suggested, they are interested in reverting to nineteenth century laissez faire capitalism, the question still remains: why are they willing to go to such an extreme?  To some extent, no doubt, philosophical and ideological factors are in play, but is there more?  The strong suspicion arises that traditional capitalism has died on the long vines of derivatives and other such expressions of unbridled greed.  To use an alternative metaphor, there is now so much grit in the capitalist cogs that the machine has essentially ground to a halt.   There is no new idea out there.  No obvious remedy.  Don't count on the New York Times printing an obituary, however.  Not yet.
     Some followers of Trotsky's thoughts are already finding conditions ripe in the present situation for a global turn to what is for them the obvious alternative--socialism and communism.
     Tick...tick..tick...

(Above photo of Andrei Bely from the pages of Wikipedia.)
    

Trotsky's Ghost: Part Two

The right wing's explanation for the current economic malaise bear a remarkable similarity to the position it takes on climate change (already a euphemism they engineered for the more stark and direct "global warming"); the right, in keeping with its state corporatist bias, effectively exports responsibility for the crisis, creating the illusion that some natural process is at work rather than its being a quite clearly man-made disaster.  Great credit must be given to Naomi Klein, whose The Shock Doctrine lays bare the right wing's tendency to see in every disaster an opportunity to erode the public interest in favor of private profit, but what we are currently witnessing goes beyond even Klein's dark scenarios in that the right is engineering this disaster.
     This evening, National Public Radio broadcast an interview with Paul Krugman on the occasion of the publication of his new book, End This Depression Now!  Krugman, whose Nobel Prize should have been for tenacity, has consistently beaten the drum in his New York Times column for more spending as a way out of what he courageously labels a depression.  There is a certain poignancy in this man, ironically hired by none other than Paul Bernanke to his Princeton teaching post, to foreswear vanity and fashion and attempt to get out the truth, becoming virtually a voice in the wilderness.  Like most prophets, however, the good doctor seems to suffer from a kind of tunnel vision.  This is the way it goes: Krugman knows that current policy is counter-productive, that more spending is needed to resuscitate an economy in depression, not less.  When asked why his former boss and now head of the Fed, Bernanke, will not implement what he must know is the needed cure, he shrugs, cocks his head to the side and speculates that the man must be under a lot of pressure to stay the current course.
     Krugman simply seems incapable of seeing the obvious.  Yes, he must get credit for calling a spade a spade, for laying out a viable plan for recovery and for being unflagging in his devotion and energy when it comes to the needs of a populace about which he clearly cares.  He will even place the blame where it belongs.  For example, he acknowledged in the radio broadcast that it is true that the richest elements in our society would suffer a bit financially for the gains made by the vast majority were we to reinfuse the economy with cash and allow a 4% inflation rate, and that only by raising more voices like his can there be any hope of turning things around.  What Krugman seems unwilling or incapable of doing is seeing the larger picture. 
     The right's clear policy is to throw oil on the flames of the current depression.  It wants a depression.  Not only does the Republican Party do anything and everything it can to stand in the way of improving the economy, (even if it means harming the lives of millions of Americans), it makes no effort to keep the strategy a secret.  On the contrary, it loudly proclaims the strategy, practically from the rooftops.  In fact, we have heard such phrases as "starving the beast" as far back as the Reagan administration.  Our latter day iteration of the same construct is the use of "gridlock" as an actual "strategy".  After an apparently dazed and confused electorate gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, the cry went out:  "Two more years of gridlock and then the White House!"
     Through the years following the Great Depression of the 1930s, most Americans would have found it unthinkable to dismantle the social safety net that we associate with New Deal reforms.  Thirty years of right wing propagandizing and historical revisionism, however, has brought us to a crossroads in which the right is now insisting on what in the playground would be called a "do-over."  "Let's have another depression.  Bring it on!"  Only this time, we will let the market do its magic, unfettered by socialist ideology.


     If all of this seems a bit mad, reminiscent of medieval religious battles, there are good reasons for it.  There has always been a strain in right wing philosophy based on the belief that the ordinary man cannot deal with freedom from worrying about his fate.  It is seen as dangerous to established order.  It emerges in what is often described as the "mean-spiritedness" of right wing ideologues experiencing the rapture.  Take a good look at Paul Ryan, for example, whose lean mien, glazed eyes and inappropriate smiles could get him a part in a drama on the Spanish Inquisition.   Or consider the fretting of Rick Santorum over sexual freedom.  For the right, the "only thing we have to fear is freedom from fear itself."  One of the ironies in all this is that although the right finds the roots of America's cultural deterioration in the revolutions of the 1960s, there has clearly been more vulgarity, crassness and social deterioration introduced since the inception of the Reaganite counter-revolution than anything we witnessed among peaceniks and flower children.  The latter groups seem innocent, even wholesome, compared to two generations bred on unharnessed commercialism and despair for the future.  Television, which provides a kind of CAT scan of the culture, (and which even in the 1950s was already being described as "a vast waste land"), has, under a regimen of deregulation and corporate freedom, filled the airwaves (or now, signifcantly, the cable wires) with fluttering vampires, ghosts, angels, psychics and reality show strivers whose competitions hearken back to the dance marathons of the Great Depression.
     In the present climate, wholesome young professors of economics who see a possible remedy to our economic problems, who, in other words, still believe in reform, may be a bit out of their league.  The portents are now out there for something more dramatic than a mere tweaking of the economic dials by the Federal Reserve.