The 2007 documentary Please Vote for Me presents a study of contrasts, a classroom experience unlike what many of us experienced growing up in the United States, yet also painfully familiar to anyone who’s been a kid in school (for example, the scene where all of the kids are crying like babies…ok, maybe that’s just me…).
The film offers up representations of discipline and authoritarian order, including shots of students in neat rows doing calisthenics and singing patriotic songs, scenes that conjure up remembrances of the old, Maoist China. Yet inside the classroom, the students embark on a new experiment in democracy, one that they and their parents take to unequivocally, enthusiastically.
Luo Lei, class monitor with two years of experience already under his belt, represents the incumbency. His ultimate victory over his challengers—the Machiavellian (and Cart- man-esque) Cheng Cheng and Xiaofei—presents us with a contradiction. Over and over again we see the children groaning and bellyaching about Luo Lei’s strict and authori- tarian behavior as class monitor, and yet, Lei nonetheless prevails over his challengers —doing so in decisive fashion.
Consider the film in light of our discussions and readings. Is this democracy in action?
What I remembered was what was missing. It took me two days to remember what had happened here, that there was a revolution here, that 70 years of embargo and shared hostility had passed between the Cuba and the United States. There was in Havana very little of the sort of official instruction and loud denunciation you might see in Tehran or even Cairo on a bad day. To find the revolution I had to go out and find it. It wasn’t easy.
Not that the state had forgotten. Efforts had to be made to reproduce the revolution and the usual posters and proclamations could be found here and there, desultory affairs placed on the entrances to government buildings and behind teller windows, dutifully ignored by the public. Politics, it seems, does not get in the way of being Cuban and folks went about their daily lives unmolested by the official discourse. Havel’s greengrocer needn’t bother in Cuba, the panorama overwhelmed the message.
But what did it mean to be Cuban? Sit in a shaded corner of the old town and watch Cubans put on the act for her visitors, Buena Vista soaked daydreams for the traveling crowds. A simulacra of the “real” Cuba on repeat, until eventually the performance becomes the thing itself.
For their part, the tourists played their part. They come to Cuba dressed to the gringo nines, with satchel and camera bandolier-strapped across their bodies, and go about their business in almost scientific fashion, self-made anthropologists in the wild. We curate our lives nowadays, our experiences mediated by the lens of a camera or a cell phone, and here it was no different, the photos taken of the “reality” and “actual Cuba” destined for a Facebook and Instagram feed but only if they matched what we already imagined Cuba to be.
Was I complicit in producing this illusion? I kept my distance from the foolishness, taking care to pull my iPhone from my cargo shorts in increments…
Cubans sat through these hijinks with aplomb, by turns amused and indifferent. Some were on the make, and found ways to pull resting tourists from park benches and into the restaurants and cabarets, but for the most part the hustle was constrained.
More than anything, their expression was one of compassion and a genuine interest. Where was I from? Mexico? Italy? What did I think of Cuba?
I stayed further out from the center and so had to learn quickly how to get around in order to go about my business. Anyone’s who’s ever lived or worked in a developing country will immediately recognize Havana’s routines, the aggravation and frustration of trying to acquire transport, the ceaseless negotiations and information sharing among ordinary folks, the easy conversations that comes when a crowd of hot and bothered folks find themselves tossed into the same mess. Cubans gave me the same camaraderie that I’ve encountered in Tehran, or Recife, or Montevideo, everyday folks eager to help a wayward tourist but also each other, even as they bustle and hustle to grab that last spot on the bus.
But the colors! The days were colors, more than I could have imagined, more than I could bear.
For Sunday’s blog, please read Sean Illing, “Fareed Zakaria Made a Scary Prediction About Democracy in 1997—And It’s Coming True” and Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, “Across the Globe, a Growing Disillusionment with Democracy.” Taking into account the lectures, our readings, and your own gut feeling, what are the prospects for democracy’s survival? How is democracy imperiled? Is democracy imperiled?
Masha Gessen’s article, The Dying Russians, brings me back to our class discussion from last week on Middle Range Theory politics. More specifically, the distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning theorists use to formulate their political and other such theories. Its relative metaphor to understand this paradigm of logic is used in the example of the hedgehog and the fox. Whereas the hedgehog claims to know one thing very well, the fox claims to be privy to many. The two theorists in this article, Michelle Parsons and Nicholas Eberstadt, embody two different methods of study. Parsons utilizes deductive reasoning and is the hedgehog, while Eberstadt informs the reader using inductive reasoning which corresponds to being the fox. Parson’s analysis of the mortality trend hones in on the 1990s, and without much hard statistical evidence to support, relies off of the testimonies of middle-aged Russians to purport the claim that similar cultural trends that occurred after WWII fed into the 90s crisis. Moreover, the scope of her study was very limited. Although she was determined to explain the defining moment that triggered this mortality crisis, she skimmed over the Gorbachev period which was flanked by economic failure and social movements. Conversely, Eberstadt is hesitant to qualify such observations into a theory, but instead looks at the mortality crisis from a decades long perspective. And unlike Parsons, Eberstadt does not prioritize one reason or the other, but broadens his scope to conduct multiple different studies to garner statistics to further inform him. His inductive reasoning has given him plenty of data, but has left him baffled as to properly pin the crisis on one thing. His role as the fox has led him to examine the problem in a more holistic and less partisan to one viewpoint not only because he has expanded the timeframe of the crisis, but also because he doesn’t believe that middle-aged, average “Muscovites” encumber the entirety of the problem.
Masha Gessen’s “The Dying Russians” is an example of the potential for truth and explanation that inheres in the encounter between “good journalism” and social science. It is also an fine illustration of how the pursuit of a puzzle—in this case “Why are Russians dying at such high rates, and so young, since 1991?”—can give way to a new and unexpected (if not more harrowing) question, “Why have Russians been dying at such high rates for decades?” The conclusion that the piece reaches is almost lyrical, and possibly not even science. Russians are, it would seem, dying of broken hearts.
Assess the piece from the perspective of this week’s discussion of the nature of science and methodology. How are cultural, institutional, or historical instruments of explanation brought to bear on the analysis, and are they effectively used? Is there a “truth” that lies beyond the grasp of social science, or even medical science. If so should we stop striving for the unreachable? You might want to keep in the back of your mind Ian Shapiro’s entreaty that we adhere to “problem-oriented research” rather than “method-driven” political science. (“…if one’s only tool is a hammer, everything in sight starts to look like a nail.”
Photo: “Dynamo” factory workers listening about the death of Joseph Stalin, 1953 by Dmitry Baltermants
Orwell’s recantation of shooting an elephant touches on an interesting example of irony in a power dynamic reversal. One might assume that authority in the British colony of Burma resides in British officials, but to the contrary, Orwell’s account points towards the power of the Burmese people influencing his actions. In this regard, I think there’s an interesting correlation between James Scott’s “Weapons of the Weak” and Orwell’s story because it makes the reader and Orwell cognizant of how ordinary Burmese people conduct their lives while galvanizing subtle change that will eventually rise to the dismantlement of imperial rule. Orwell manifests this concepts in his thoughts of shooting the “mustly” elephant which: “made me (Orwell) vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary– and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you” (Orwell 2). Orwell’s unsteadiness can be attributed to how he feels coerced by the Burmese people to make the elephant topple by gunshot and demonstrates the power of crowd influence over British colonial rule. Likewise, in the preceding moment before aligning his rifle to shoot the elephant, Orwell has an epiphany where he understood the: “hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd– seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of this yellow faces behind” (Orwell 3). Orwell’s revelation reveals the accumulation of power in the masses, but also undermines the inefficiency and vanity of the British Empire’s fluke to subjugate Burmese to British power — further exhibiting Scott’s theory of slow subversion by the masses.
“The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.”
Who has power in Orwell’s classic account, and why?
In the odd anecdote about boredom that he uses to preface his argument, Gatto seems to hint that he believes in the capacity of children to take matters into their own hands and spend their time autonomously self-educating. This same concept re-emerges when he discusses the ways in which public schools, as opposed to homeschooling options, guide children away from their individuality. While public schools may not always encourage children to be fully unique, it is a dangerous assumption that children would be better off on their own.
I have never attended a traditional public school. In fact, I’ve only been to very small, unconventional schools, a private middle school and charter high school. One of the main things that I appreciated about middle school was the individual support that I received. I was encouraged to be myself, and at the same was given the materials and guidance to productively discover who I wanted to be. To this extent, I agree with Gatto in that public schools are faulty in regards to their lack of adequate individual attention. However, I don’t know that I would be at Williams today if my parents had decided that I should take matters into my own hands, or even that they should homeschool me. I feel that I am not just a productive of the encouragement that I was given as a middle schooler, but of the social and academic challenges that I would not have attempted had they not been presented to me in high school. Therefore, it seems to me that adult guidance and intellectual engagement are essential, in some capacity, to productive development, and, though they aren’t perfect, public schools provide a version of these things for many children who don’t have another option.
Schooling in the United States of America has always been a hotly debated topic in politics. I have always had similar views as Gatto has in his article. Traditional schooling is filled with monotonous tasks that do not drive students to strive for a fuller understanding of the material they are studying. The incentives set by traditional school grading systems leave students looking for easy ways out, rather than truly learning and grasping the material. Cheating is a perfect example of the failings in traditional schooling. If schooling worked perfectly each student would strive to learn the material and complete assignments with an eagerness to learn. Instead, students risk the inevitably dire consequences that accompany cheating in order to quickly finish their work and receive a passable grade. Beyond cheating, students often look to just “get by” in many of their classes. Students desire to educate themselves in traditional schooling is blurred by the monotony of classes and inept grading systems. Despite this, I do understand you get the most out of the education system by putting the most work in. If you do not put any effort into your education you will leave schooling possibly worse off than before. But, if you actively take charge of your education, despite its failings, you can maybe reach your full potential.
I think you make a great point, Cole. I’m disheartened by the effects of disproportionate funding to schools in a unified district; particularly geared towards schools susceptible to being attended by lower income students. The San Francisco Unified School district manifests the same problems you’ve observed in Chicago and has taken a tremendous toll on the caliber of public high schools in the city. I think it’s really important to pay attention to how external influences have played a role in influencing how money is spent in each district which reminds me of our class discussion last week when we talked about participation in the first dimension of power. I’m now curious about the ethicality of participating in a system upset the balance of our supposed egalitarian society to benefit one group of students while disaffecting the others.
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