The Three P's

My new book, Teach Like It’s Music, is filled with chapters like: The 3D’s. The 4-H Club. These handy little summaries that speak volumes. 

 

So now I’m looking for a place to talk about the 3 P’s, especially since they are causing so much havoc. And have forever. Short version: What drives so much evil-doing? By naming it out loud, being alert as to its presence, calling it by it’s true name when it comes disguised, might we perhaps diminish a little of its capacity to do harm? When watching the news or listening to politicians or thinking about decisions being made, keep this handy-dandy guide close at hand as to what’s behind it all. The 3 P’s—Profit, Privilege, Power.

 

Profit: The whistle-blower movies I love when a meek David goes up against the Goliath of corporate wealth have one thing in common: people in the corporation are aware that they are doing something harmful—think the tobacco industry, nuclear power plants, the Catholic Church, what have you— but are reluctant (to put it mildly) to stop because they are profitting tremendously from addicting smokers, polluting rivers, endangering health, protecting priests. And so comes the cover-up where money trumps morals—and that verb is now doubly expressive. 

 

Privilege: When people are granted unearned privilege, they will go to any lengths to protect it. That’s the entire driving force of White Supremacy, male dominance, national patriotism and so on. People born on third base will push the narrative that they hit a triple through their own hard work and training and everyone else is lazy and untalented.   

Power: People who base their identity on the power they wield over others will sell their soul to maintain that power. Witness the circus of scrambling Republicans trying to dismiss, spin, ignore, deride, excuse the clear facts of someone who has overreached the powers granted through the electoral process, someone who clearly (read the transcript!) desecrated his Constitutional Oath to try to maintain his power by any means necessary—including help from the Ukraine or Russia or North Korea or what have you. 

The more people wake up to the charade of words that disguise the obvious motives of profit, privilege and power, the less power those lies have. The good-faith part of myself would like to convince those 3P people to be better versions of themselves, but the realist in me knows that people who spend a lifetime building the narrative that these are the things that matter, whose very identity is based on making money, feeling superior and lording over others aren’t about to change. But as long as democracy is still breathing—even if it be wheezing and gasping— we can keep waking up those who are neither saints nor sinners to at least notice when the Emperor has no clothes and gather a tiny amount of courage to say it out loud. Or at least say it by voting. That’s one of the ways we can turn things around, indeed, already are turning things around—witness Virginia and Kentucky. 

So people, keep your 3P crap-detector radar alert and see you at the polls. 

Just Desserts

Awakened at 4 a.m. by a mosquito. Really?! In November?

In my early morning stupor, I had this thought:

If you believe in reincarnation, surely that bloodsucker Trump will come back as a mosquito. 

And I will gleefully swat him dead. 

Night and Day

Every day at school, I am astounded by children. I envy their expressive and flexible bodies, am amazed by their insightful and surprising thoughts, am moved by their capacity for deep feeling, kindness and compassion and always entertained by their fantastic sense of humor. Every day I feel my intuitive faith in the goodness, intelligence and artful possibilities of human beings affirmed many times by 5-year old, 9-year old, 13-year old children and all ages in-between.

By night, I am astonished by the dead lumpish bodies of adult human beings, dumbfounded by their incapacity or unwillingness to entertain a single clear thought, bewildered by their meanness and their determination to keep feeding their hatred, shocked by their brazen lies and total lack of shame, flabbergasted by their insistence on accepting ugliness, ignoring artfulness and knowing no humor beyond that made at the expense of others. And simply unable to accept that these are the people that rise to the positions of power and purposefully harm the world for their own privilege, outward power and false sense of self-worth.

Night and day, my two worlds. Thank goodness I at least have the first to counterbalance the second. If only we can hold on long enough, my hope remains that these children will carry these extraordinary people they are into their adult bodies and future and then, a new world will dawn. Of course, that means schools and teachers waking up far beyond business as usual to notice these beautiful beings before them and bring them to the height of their promise.

Well, that’s what gets me up in the morning with energy and gets me to sleep at night with hope still with a beating heart. 

My Favorite Author

My  old piano teacher Art Lande once told me that before he plays a concert, he imagines himself in the audience listening to the music that sings out exactly what he wants and needs to hear. Many authors have confessed—me amongst them—that they want to write the kind of book they would like to read. Makes sense, yes?

So I was very pleased when someone posted on Facebook a small section from a book I wrote 13 years ago and I read my own words and thought, “Yeah!” They were timely, articulate and said exactly what I wanted to say and exactly what I wanted to hear again. 

And so here they are. (And thanks to Ki Adams for both posting and including this book in his college classes!):

Is it a coincidence that, on the day the USA Presidential impeachment hearings are beginning, my Orientation to Music Education class is reading the chapter on Truth in Doug Goodkin's extraordinary book, “The ABCs of Education: A Primer for Schools to Come”? 

“I believe that this [agreeing to discuss things that are often kept hushed and secretive] is what the Founding Fathers had in mind by granting free speech. They paid people the compliment of being mature enough to discuss, weigh, consider, debate, and ultimately come to their own conclusions. Cloaking things in silence, refusing to discuss certain topics, wrapping information in glitzy, misleading pamphlets, presenting just one official version of the facts—these are the tools of tyranny, however cleverly disguised.”

Goodkin goes on to suggest a series of simple steps that might help lead all of us—teachers, students, and citizens—back to a healthy public discourse:

1. Offer a variety of diverse sources. Where do stories agree and where do they differ? Reading one story from various perspectives provides a larger view that helps us ferret out the key questions and points of controversy.

2. Analyze whether a given source has a stake in how the story gets presented. Who profits? Will the pamphlet written by the corporation give a fair and unbiased view of corporate practice? Will an investigative committee made up of members of the institution being criticized give a fair and unbiased report?

3. Hear the accounts from the powerless and marginalized players in the stories—the people often most directly affected by an event or a policy, whose stake in the story is not profit, but survival. What does the philosophy of Manifest Destiny look like to a Native American?

4. Bring caring into the discussion. Who is hurt and harmed by this event? What values are driving this action?

5. Bring citizenship into the discussion. What is my obligation once I know more about what really happened? How much should I speak out about this? What action might I take?

Good advice for us all… wherever we reside in the world. In the meantime, I strongly urge anyone involved in education in any form/level to read this book. "Open the windows and let this wise, simple, heartfelt reminder reawaken the beauty in education." (Jack Kornfield, Buddhist teacher and author of "A Path with Heart")

Too Short!

We’re into a food theme for my 5-year-old music classes and today they sang and danced my jazz “One Potato” number, then moved to the xylophones to improvise little phrases based on combinations of the plastic food I had in the middle of the circle. Things like: 

“Watermelon apple, watermelon apple, watermelon apple, Yum, Yum. Yum!” 

Bam! Over a simple C and G drone and playing the “yums” on C, you got yourself a nice little piece of music. That you made up. And the others tried to guess. With a “Bluebells Cockleshells” song as the filler between each kids’ composition, well, there you have a nice rondo form piece put together in 5 minutes. 

These classes are 30 minutes long, but at the end of the first class, several kids spontaneously commented, “It was too short!!” The next class came in and off we went again and darn if a kid didn’t say at the end, “It was too short!” Which I take to mean, “Hey, this was super-fun and I was just getting in the groove and why do we have to stop just because of two stupid hands on a clock?” Good question!

I’ve had times in my life when the clock ticked so maddeningly slow. Like the last half-hour in my childhood school before summer vacation. Most of the times I’ve had to go to church. Many of my classes in school. The time I went to a celebration of Frau Orff ‘s(Carl Orff’s 4^thwife) 80^thbirthday quite hungry and suffering from jet lag and sitting through speech after speech. In German. Which I don’t speak. For 3 hours. Near the end, a music group sang a song and they were asked for an encore. Had I a gun, I certainly would have shot the person who requested it. When finally released, I rushed to the food and there were only a few small snacks. Most of them filled with meat. I’m a vegetarian. Now that was torture!

But on the other side, I have sometimes felt like the children today. Deep in the pleasure of something that ends too soon. And still enjoying so profoundly most of the minutes of each and every day, I suspect these could easily be my last words:

“It was too short!”

Letter to the Republicans

Dear Republicans,

 

Here is a timely reminder from former Republican Congressman David Jolly that you would do well to heed. There was a time where Republicans could differ from Democrats over issues like the economy and government control of various parts of public life and still feel that they were part of the same country and shared the same concerns about protecting the promises of the Constitution. But not today. Here’s my guest editor’s note to you. There’s still time for you to jump ship and save a bit of your soul and perhaps a bit of your country. Mark these words:

These are the moments where my anger is somewhat palpable because you've just got to be honest. These are, in today's Republican Party, spineless politicians rotten to the core without virtue. Without any level of human integrity, devoid of self-respect, self-reflection, without courage, and without the moral compass to recognize their own malevolence.

And one day maybe they will have the recognition of how they failed the country and themselves in this moment. But that would be giving them credit that somewhere down deep they have the goodness to recognize how to reconcile their own failings with what is right and just in American politics. And frankly what is right and wrong in the eyes of adults and children alike. And there's no other example. And why no argument will ever work for Republicans, and I agree they inevitably will make the case this is not impeachable.

The problem is it requires every single Republican to align with Donald Trump and say that only Donald Trump speaks the truth. That Lt. Col. Vindman, a man of honor and Purple Heart recipient, does not speak the truth. Ambassador McKinley, somebody who's referred to as the “dean of the foreign service core,” does not speak the truth. Ambassador Yovanovitch, somebody who dedicated her life to promoting freedom and U.S. ideals on the world stage, does not speak the truth. Only Donald Trump does. And there is no greater example of selling your soul to a charlatan than what Republicans are doing right now in the House and the Senate. And their legacies are on the line just as much as Donald Trump's. We know the character of Donald Trump. We know the failings of Donald Trump. Watching play out in this impeachment proceeding is the failings of a Republican Party and every single member that goes along with this.        -David Jolly

The Small and the Meek

“Some people are so poor all they have is money. “    —Bob Marley

Where’s My Roy Cohn is a timely movie, not only revealing what makes the power-hungry tick, but specifically connecting Roy Cohn with his protogeé Donald Trump. Cohn was the right-hand man of Joe McCarthy who conducted the witch-hunt (the real use of that term, not the co-opted spin Trump is using) against Communists and later homosexuals. Part of the complexity and irony with a person like Cohn was that he ruthlessly and expertly aided that hunt even as he himself was gay. In fact, he likely had a sexual relationship with another hunter on the team, David Schine and when Schine was drafted, Cohn tried to use his influence with the military to give Schine an easier deal. When the military refused to give preferential treatment, he and McCarthy turned the hunt against ferreting out Communists in the armed forces. But you don’t mess with the Pentagon. It backfired and McCarthy’s Communist/homosexual purge came to a halt when a Senator declared, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The Committee disbanded and that was that. 

Of course, Cohn kept on as a lawyer, defending Mafia bosses, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful and twisting things around always to his personal gain. He helped Reagan get elected and defended Trump against various law suits involved racial discrimination in housing and non-payment of employees. His main strategy was, “Spin the charges to make the accusers look like it’s their problem, never apologize, never admit anything, never show remorse, lie, lie, lie.” And so he set in motion the main strategies of the Republican party carried on by Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and today’s list of evil, evil people purposefully manipulating the easily-duped public for their own political and financial gains. When asked if he could have helped Nixon, Cohn shamelessly suggested he could have gotten Nixon off, advised him to burn the tapes and so on, without a shred of thought that this would be a betrayal of the American people, illegal, anti-Constitutional and just plain wrong. In short, if asked “have you no sense of decency?” his answer would be “Of course not! That’s for weak people.” In his world of caring only for riches and powers, all of his actions made sense. As do Trump’s. 

But just desserts often comes around at the end. Cohn, the witch-hunter against homosexuals, died of Aids. And won’t it be delicious when Trump’s lies finally catch up with him and he’s escorted from the White House, hopefully into jail? Cohn managed to keep avoiding various charges against him, but he was disbarred and from that moment on, all his “loyal” friends, including Trump, abandoned him. Such loyalty is always based on “what can I get out of this ‘friendship?’” and if the answer is nothing, well, that’s the end of that.” I don’t suspect Sean Hannity will be visiting Trump in jail. 

Meanwhile, just as Cohn was driven to climb up the ladder to hell by hanging out with the rich and powerful, so am I driven to descend the steps to heaven by spending my days with the small and the meek— children. Jesus is not my savior, but I like his blessing of the meek and the idea that they shall inherit the earth. (But they better hurry before the power-crazy destroy it!). Equally, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Hey, Republican Christians and Wall-Street moguls who go to church, are you getting this memo?

Of course, little children are powerless in one sense and pretty powerful in another. I’d like to see these vicious pseudo-adult predators carry on their work while caring for a baby. I’d like them to try to teach preschoolers for a day and then they’ll see how powerful they really are. But what I’d really like them to see is what a bad deal they’ve made for themselves by ruthlessly following the wrong dream and let the children lead them back to some sense of the wonder of life, the appreciation of beauty, the value of real friendship, the expressive artistry that frames the 3-year old’s day as they sing, dance and play their way through the world. It takes just as much energy to learn how to teach children and be taught by them as it does to claw your way to more riches and power, but the rewards are so much greater. The real power is the inner spiritual power, the moral power, the sense of having something beautiful to give back to the world in exchange for the gift of a human birth. Telling Trump and his type to “be nice. Tell the truth. Listen to others. Etc.” makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the dream/nightmare they’ve chosen. It’s the driving narrative that has to change and then decency can take its rightful place back in the world that is driving it out.

It’s Sunday and while folks are dutifully going to church to mindlessly mouth the inert platitudes that they’re not living, this is a sermon to consider. 

And then go see the movie.