Another advantage of the “shortage” of STEM workers: You can stress that education has to focus on “practical” skills in science, technology, engineering, and math, while dismissing the importance of history, humanities, and other “fuzzy” studies. The implicit message: Get hard skills to work within the system, but never acquire a questing and questioning attitude…
W.J. Astore You’ve probably seen the headline: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is gutting the Army to numbers not seen since the sleepy days before Pearl Harbor! Senior Republicans like Lindsey Graham and John McCain have already declared that these cuts are DOA (dead on arrival) in the Senate. Why? Allegedly because they endanger…
b. traven Until I was about 23 I never thought about the “meaning” of words. I spoke and I listened to words, but I didn’t assess all of the nuances that they can contain. It was a simpler time (or so it seemed to me during the Great Depression and World War II) and people…
Don Rose I am a sinner with a criminal past. Since the statute of limitations has run out (I hope), I confess that as a kid I once or twice shoplifted the local dime store, swiped a 78 rpm platter at the record shop and even snuck into a movie now and then. Later ingested…
Imperial Proconsul Bremer, desert boots and all, in a distinctly American moment Michael Brenner There are more reasons for Americans to feel aggrieved today than at any time since the Vietnam War ended nearly 40 years ago. At no time before or since has there been so little effort to remedy those conditions. That contradiction…
Michael Murry. Introduction by William Astore. Robert Plant in “Stairway to Heaven” sang that “you know sometimes words have two meanings.” As Michael Murry powerfully shows in his first essay for The Contrary Perspective, nowadays words have innumerable meanings, or simply no meaning at all. And it’s by design. We live, as he memorably suggests,…
W.J. Astore This past weekend, CBS 60 Minutes did a segment on the F-35 fighter program. The basic facts are these: the program is seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget. Yes, you read that right: Not $163 million, but $163 billion. The lead contractor, Lockheed Martin, is essentially unapologetic about the delays…
In an age when many journalists are corporate-owned or are reduced by various pressures into stenographers for the powerful, it’s encouraging to hear of new journalistic ventures that promise to be critical of those in power. Glenn Greenwald, who’s established a reputation for outspoken journalism at Salon.com and The Guardian, and Jeremy Scahill, an investigative…
Richard Sahn These days, when you talk to college students, you quickly discover the extent to which they view education as the means for getting the better jobs American society has to offer. Put bluntly, they see education merely as a means to an end, the end being a rewarding job that they otherwise…
W.J. Astore Mark Danner has a probing article at TomDispatch.com on the career arc of Dick Cheney, the self-selected Vice President under George W. Bush. Cheney’s approach to history, an attitude he shared with Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, was the idea he could make his own reality, independent of history. Previous precedents on waterboarding…
The Contrary Perspective 