Are You Not Entertained?

The President apparently worked the phones and told the sports executives that they need to plan on getting football going in September.

It makes sense only if you look at the issue from his perspective.  His base is also a sports-addicted population.  In the red states, NFL practically beats church-going during the season!

So, if there is no sports on the horizon, especially if there will be no NFL, then it will begin to dawn on even the most loyal tRump cultist that this COVID-19 is not any hoax, and that their dear leader has been lying to them.  As a result, in the elections in November, there won't be anything to stop the Democrats from running up the score against a weak and demoralized candidate and party.

I hope against hope that Americans will use this global catastrophe straighten out our individual and collective priorities.

I have, forever, blogged here about the awfully screwed up priorities of this American society (and others too) in which we paid gazillions to ball players, while systematically gutting long-term capacity building--from education to infrastructure to health care to ...

Here's a re-post of one of those from the past--this is from April 2017
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Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to cut philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers.

This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness"?

And then came the unempathetic tRumpians!

Four years ago, the newspaper ran my commentary on homelessness that I blogged about yesterday.

The tRump people came quickly, and I blogged about that too.

As we think about the mess that we are in, I want you also to think about my pissed off response to a tRump voter's comment: "a basketball arena for a quarter of a billion dollars is a f*ing twisted money-making interpretation of philanthropy. A travesty!"

Here is that post from April 7, 2016:
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So, yesterday's post made it to print in a remarkably short time.  Homelessness is such an urgent and contemporary issue.

A majority of responses--at the newspaper's site and as emails to me--are far from being civil and constructive.

Here are a few excerpts, along with my comments:

Hey, why not go after the writer's Indian background and engage with that distraction?

As someone ‘growing up in India’ what is the writer’s position on the fact that “Homelessness in India has been a problem for centuries; causing the average family to have an average of five generations being homeless.”

Or this from an email to me:

Dr. Khe, most of all, I am very sorry you have lived in our country so long without experiencing our kindness and generosity -- and I mean, as a whole people. 

Another wants to trade our homeless for India's homeless because that way "our social parasites will starve to death in India"

isn’t it amazing how people can travel thousands of miles risking death to come to America, manage to find jobs to not only support themselves but also send 1/3-1/2 of their paycheck back home to support their family, and yet right here in Eugene Oregon our citizens find it impossible to find work to support themselves. Surely laziness, apathy, and a dead end dead beat lifestyle has nothing to do with that. It’s obviously the 1% to blame. What Junior fails to grasp is simply put, let’s trade homeless for homeless. Bring in India’s homeless for ours. $10,000 says the Indian’s find jobs their first day and rise from poverty whereas our social parasites will starve to death in India.

Another claims they have homes where they "live rent-free"--the public parks!

Many of the so-called “homeless” are not truly homeless. Their homes are in our public parks, where they choose to live rent-free. Living in a place that charges rent would require some of them to take on the burden of a job, and it would require some to give up other expenses, such as alcohol, that they consider more important.

Comments and emails recycle the myths that have repeated so many times that people believe them to be facts!

I believe it is a fair assumption that most of them choose to be homeless rather than to make other choices more repugnant to them. Some people choose to live in the society whose values and personal responsibilities they reject. We have elevated our regard for individual liberty too far above our concern for civic comity.

And the piece de resistance:

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz want to secure our border and rigidly enforce our immigration laws. That would stop the flow of countless tons of illegal drugs coming into this country.
The homeless population is composed of three main groups in varying percentages: the drug and alcohol addicted, the mentally ill, and just plain bums who feed off the bleeding hearts.
Public policy No. 1 should state that no homeless person should be allowed to interfere with commerce in any way whatsoever, cause the expenditure of public money to clean up their mess, or cause the expenditure of public money to support a sane, able-bodied person in any way.
Every state should have a very isolated intake-detention center where street people are taken under a police civil hold for a physical and mental evaluation. Every city should prohibit social service agencies from serving those without a 5-year work and residential history in that city.
Any talk of involuntary commitment of the mentally ill sends liberals into a frenzy. Every person afflicted with a mental condition that causes a break with reality should have an implanted electronic chip that shows their doctor’s name and address, diagnosis, prescribed meds, and next of kin or some person designated by a court as their guardian or lookout, which every patient should have.

"should have an implanted electronic chip" ... my, my,  my!

There were a couple of people who emailed me wanting to work with me in order to address the problem.  And then there was this comment at the newspaper site:

It is crude and abusive to allow people to mock other humans without having to show a little courage and let the community know who they are. I spent years living at the Mission decades ago, and learned a lot. But I really, really doubt those who mock the poor are open to anything but their own need to dominate and humiliate. Hugh Massengill, Eugene

They mocked him for that comment.  How unfortunate!

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts

In the normal course of events, today I would be preparing to travel to Denver.  After a number of years, this is the first time when I won't be going.  The novel coronavirus made me cancel the trip even before the meeting was officially canceled.

Every conference helped me understand new ideas.  More than that, going to a conference was also like a research field trip that gave me a window to observing the world from a different place.  Often, these resulted in newspaper columns too.

The following is about a public policy crisis that has not been resolved--homelessness.  In fact, it has only worsened.  I shudder at the thought of how much worse it could get as a result of COVID-19.

The following is my post (which became a slightly edited column) on homelessness from April 2016.
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I picked up plenty of new ideas at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which was held in San Francisco. In addition to the scholarly sessions that served abundant intellectual fodder, the city streets also made me think, yet again, about one particular issue—the homeless.

The Hilton at Union Square was the main venue. Every time I walked a mere block from the hotel, away from the touristy trolley car station, it was depressing to see homeless men and women of all ages. It was a bizarre and simultaneous juxtaposition of affluence and material deprivation.

Estimates are that there are nearly 7,000 homeless people in San Francisco. No amount of intellectual inquiry about homelessness can help me emotionally understand how the mightiest country, which can wage wars on far corners of the earth, can also have seven thousand people homeless in one of the iconic cities of the modern world. Homelessness in San Francisco is so acute and has been so for a while that the Board of Supervisors has been mulling over declaring a state of emergency, which will help bypass some of the regulations and requirements that otherwise will delay implementing even temporary measures to address the situation.

Meanwhile, the City of Palo Alto, which is in the heart of the fabled Silicon Valley, is considering building new housing and offering them at subsidized rates to families that earn less than 250,000 dollars a year. Yes, even those earning a quarter of a million dollars are finding it difficult to get a place of their own in a part of the world where unimaginable riches are made overnight. If shelter is not affordable for the rich middle class in the Golden State, then that contrast alone will make one sympathize with San Francisco’s homeless.

Here in Oregon, especially in the Eugene-Springfield region, we can relate to the homelessness emergency in San Francisco. The homeless, whose number according to reports exceeds a thousand on any given day, have become a constant fixture in the city and by the river too. The part of the bike path alongside the Willamette that I always walk often has telltale signs of homeless people having used that for a few hours or even a few days.

My first exposure to homelessness in the US was even before I got here. Growing up in India, when comparing and contrasting the two political economic systems that the Soviet Union and America represented, my friends and I had a tough time imagining how a rich country could have poor people sleeping on city sidewalks, like how the urban poor in India spent their nights. During my first year in graduate school in Los Angeles, it was even more of an up-close-and-personal exposure—intellectually and on the streets—to homelessness as a public policy issue.

Whether it is San Francisco or here in the Eugene/Springfield area, the homeless are surrounded by extravagant symbols of affluence. For instance, even here, a couple of blocks away from downtown Eugene is the two hundred million dollar basketball arena that hosts entertainment events. Obviously, it is not that we do not have the money to spend on the humanitarian crisis. Apparently we do not consider spending on easing the human suffering to be a priority, in contrast to our eagerness to amuse ourselves.

The local governments, to their credit, have for a while clearly and loudly spoken about urban homelessness. A few cities consider homelessness to be a crisis enough to warrant a “state of emergency declaration.” But, when it is a public policy issue not merely in one or two cities, and not merely in one or two states, it is clear that local governments cannot solve this problem on their own. There are deeper structural issues that have to be addressed by state governments in association with the federal government too.

It is unfortunate that the election season underway has not addressed real and urgent issues like urban homelessness. In a democracy, it is through politics that we establishing priorities on issues deserving our collection action. But, the campaigns and debates have rarely been about such compelling issues. Instead, we have been verbally assaulted with inanities like the size of a man’s fingers as evidence of hyper-masculinity and virility.

Thus, after almost four decades since those teenage years halfway around the world, I continue to be puzzled that a rich country has so many homeless people and, more importantly, its citizens even seem to be ok with it. I suppose the more things change, the more they do stay the same!