Author Archives: scott

Weekend Reading

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It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?”  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions” like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work.  Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 – including physicians and ministers – had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.

Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

The “it’s suppose to happen” in inner-city communities reframe is not surprising. Places like Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown exist because of the fear-industrial complex. The white middle-class flocked from cities into the suburbs and rural communities partially due to fear of black and Latino youth, integrated schools, and urban crime. The continuously deployed the narrative of “it’s not suppose to happen in Newtown” and their neighborhoods mirroring “American family’s dream” embodies this entrenched belief. The efforts to imagine Holmes and Lanza as good kids turned evil, to scour the earth for reasons and potential solutions, works to preserve the illusion of safety, the allure of white suburbia, and the power of whiteness.

In imagining the killers as good kids who did a bad thing, who snapped because of a divorce, because of too much medication, because of inadequate mental health treatment, because of too much mental health care, because of guns, and because of who knows what, white manhood — the visible link that binds together so many of these shootings –always gets erased.

Would America Be Better with Private Prosecutions?

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I’ve been debating this idea for a while. I first learned about private prosecutions in The Justice Cascade by Kathryn Sikkink, in which she examines human rights prosecutions in Argentina, Portugal, and Greece and argues that they contributed to the creation of the International Criminal Court by diffusion of the concept of human rights prosecutions. In her chapter on Argentina, Sikkink mentions a characteristic of the Argentinian judicial system that allowed human rights prosecutions to occur, and it’s a practice common in Latin American civil law systems (and maybe civil law systems in Europe and Asia – I don’t know). Basically, in common law systems like America’s, the state is always the prosecutor in criminal cases. This stems from the notion that a crime against the state’s laws is a crime against the state/society as well as a crime against the actual victim. While this functions in many ways, it fails in instances where the state doesn’t want to proceed with prosecutions either because the case is deemed too weak to be successful or because the state is actually culpable or even the perpetrator of crimes.

In Argentina, after years of disappearances and human rights abuses by the military regime, some people began to circumvent state prosecutions by leveling accusations at members of the state police independently through private prosecutions. Others were able to use private prosecution to force wary state prosecutors in the judiciary to continue moving forwards against the executive. Sikkink believes that this is just one of many things that allowed human rights prosecutions to arise in Argentina, but it is surely an important one.

While private prosecutions aren’t part of the American justice system, I wonder if they should be. I’m no lawyer, and this isn’t realistic, but it could be a tool with which victims typically unable to see perpetrators prosecuted (because the crime was ignored by the state or they were victimized by societal problems as much as by actual perpetrators) could still seek justice. Right now you can sue others in civil court and win monetary judgements, but the prosecution in criminal court is run by the state. If you end up in jail, it’s because the state thought you should be in there and a jury agreed. What if, instead of just suing for damages, victims of foreclosure fraud could get fraudulent bankers facing jail time?  What if, to circumvent police that refuse to call date-rape “rape,” victims of sexual assault could send rapists to jail?

Obviously this is no guarantee of justice: rich bankers and corporate executives would have the best lawyers, and even rogue police could be protected by their own, and judges and juries are just as affected by rape culture as the rest of society. But it could be a start.  Especially if lawyers were willing to take up these cases pro bono (or non-profits/social movements could start funds to pay fees) victims that usually can’t afford to seek out justice would be that much closer to some peace of mind. If only a few trigger-happy stand-your-ground neighbors, poisoned-your-water-supply polluters, or you-were-drunk-but-you-still-said-yes rapists who usually stay free instead found themselves in jail, it would send a message that just because you are powerful or your crimes don’t get everyone’s attention doesn’t mean you won’t at least be brought before a court and maybe found guilty.

Of course, even if it were possible to implement this, there would be problems. The power of some groups could still be strong enough to dissuade some from filing prosecutions, and the shaming of some victims would be too much for many to even think about coming forward. And it isn’t unrealistic to think that corporations-as-people would use private prosecutions to enact even more overreach against each other, whistle-blowers, and the usual victims.

I Went to David Brooks’ Class So You Don’t Have To

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When it was first announced that NYT columnist David Brooks would be teaching a class at Yale on humility, a lot of people were quick to point out how ironic it was. When the syllabus was first posted this week, Twitter just about exploded as people pulled quotes like “We will pay special attention to those who attended elite prep schools and universities” from the syllabus (keep in mind, it’s a course on humility, at Yale, taught by David Brooks). The syllabus includes readings by or about famous-but-humble minds like Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Moses, Augustine, and none other than David Brooks.

So I decided to go to the first class yesterday with no intention of actually staying. While it wasn’t that excitingly terrible or good, I did end up making a few observations, and of course there were a few points of “you can’t make this stuff up.” Like when we were trying to cram into the room and he needed to get past dozens of students to get to his seat, and he raised his hands and (I kid you not) said “I feel like Bono!” Or when he was explaining office hours (which are Monday nights at either a cafe or a bar) and said that meeting with students individually was exciting “certainly for them but also for me.” I storified some other observations which I’m restating here:

  • Brooks acknowledged that parts of the syllabus smack of rich or powerful white men, but the first day still begins with Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall.
  • Of the ~55 students that attended the first day, I counted 8 women and about 10 non-white males. Only 20 will be admitted, so it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
  • After reading 10 definitions of humility, Brooks literally said “God had Ten Commandments, so I figured I’d stop there.”
  • I learned that Brooks has met Obama, Bush, Clinton, Biden, and McCain. On day one of a class on humility.

Weekend Reading

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The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early ’40s through the early ’70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Within 24 hours, 5.2 million people had read the Reddit interview. It was the most-trafficked post in Reddit’s history. Just before signing off, Obama mentioned GottaRegister.com, the campaign’s official voter registration site, and 30,000 people registered to vote from that link. “And he didn’t even hyperlink the fucking thing, so they, like, actually copy-and-pasted it, and opened up a new tab, and put it in,” said a senior official. On Election Day, 82,670 Redditors would connect again with the campaign, giving “upvotes” to a message posted by Obama in the afternoon, with tens of thousands more likely seeing the post. A massive hit—and strategically successful. The Reddit chat occurred in the middle of the Republican National Convention, and the Democrats, through a guerilla-like tactic, had seized control of the Internet for the day. They’d do it again that week, too.

The next night, Clint Eastwood opened up for Mitt Romney at the RNC. He talked to an empty chair. Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean ran into Jim Messina’s office: You’ve got to see this. Stop. What. You. Are. Doing. Two other Obama digital staffers—Jessi Langsen and Alex Wall—who were watching the feed came up to Goff and Joe Rospars within minutes. Another staffer had found a picture of the president pointing at a chair and asked, “Can we post this picture of the president?”

CFP Roundup

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As school comes back in session for most, there are a handful of calls for papers that I wanted to draw your attention to.

A conference on Theory and Practice: The Limits of Ethics for Guiding Action will be hosted at the University of Toronto in March. While the conference is centered on ethics, philosophy, and justice, proposals are welcome in any disciplines. Submissions are due on January 18th.

Cornell Law School’s Inter-University Graduate Conference [pdf] is accepting submissions, which will be due January 18th.

American University’s Washington College of Law has a student writing competition on International Humanitarian Law. All law students are eligilble, and the deadline in January 31st.

The Sudan Studies Association will be convening its annual meeting in May in Philadelphia, and they are accepting submissions for papers, panels, roundtables, and thematic conversations. The theme for the conference is Greater Sudan: Cross Roads to the Future. Submissions are due on March 1st.

The Yale Journal of International Affairs (where I am an assistant editor) has issued a call for papers for its spring/summer issue. The journal aims to bridge academia and policy on a variety of topics, and will be accepting submissions for short articles and op-eds. Deadline is March 1st.

UPDATE: A commenter has alerted me that The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs is taking submissions for the print journal from scholars, practitioners, and PhD candidates until Feb 15. They also accept submissions for their website.

As usual, if you know of any conferences or journals that are looking for submissions, let me know!

Weekend Reading

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New year, new reading.

The Wendlenders chose explicitly non-violent forms of resistance, but the West German authorities attacked, undeterred by moral force or persuasion. A year later, when the government restarted construction of a nuclear power plant at Brokdorf near the North Sea, perhaps they expected the same peaceful acquiescence. What they found instead was quite different.

Opposition groups called a large protest and nearly a hundred thousand came; many attempted to storm the building site and occupy it. As the police tried to drive protesters away with clubs and water cannons, they were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails, mostly hurled by youths in black ski masks and motorcycle helmets. By the end of the day, protestors had breached all but the last inner fence of the construction site and destroyed a water canon truck with petrol bombs. The authorities were stunned by the protesters’ ferocity, and the fight at Brokdorf revealed a new radical force in the cracks of West German society.

Already activists for wages for internships have begun to follow a similar scheme, gathering interns for shared experiences and culling examples of particularly egregious work. Intern Labor Rights, an outpost of the Arts and Labor Occupy group, describes as part of its outreach how internships “devalue the fundamental dignity of work” and how “unpaid internships produce a culture of self-denigration in the workforce.” Such efforts still operate on a small scale, but they point to a growing sense among interns of their rights and worth. A small ripple of lawsuits early in 2012—after the Department of Labor issued guidelines that suggested it would crack down on the practice—has prompted a number of employers to pay their interns.

2012 in Review

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It’s the end of a long year, and everyone’s doing some reflecting. As usual, it’s nice to take a look at how this blog has fared in the past year and to reminisce about its author.

The past year has been pretty crazy here at the Backslash blog. This humble wordpress blog saw almost five times as much traffic as the year before, and has gained a wonderful group of readers and followers. I have yet to fully come to grips with that fact, but I continue to try as you continue to keep reading. The upsurge in readership was predominantly due to what I actually thought was a mediocre post – “Catching Joseph Kony” – in response to the Kony 2012 phenomenon. There are actually two other LRA-related pieces I wrote that I am happier with – a history of peace and conflict and a look back on Invisible Children’s work. That they didn’t see much light is a result of bad timing as much as it is the result of how damn long they are.

Other popular posts this year include a brief look at Japanese internment in Arizona, the progressive history of Arizona’s constitution, and my contributions to the annual Caine Prize discussions. My favorite rant was probably a chance to direct my anger at a state legislator I dislike and defend lower tuition, but it’s unnerving how often people get to it by doing a web search for “students are irresponsible.” No doubt, the writing on this blog has improved primarily because of what I read – and I’ll continue to relay that through the weekend reading feature.

I spent a lot of this year in a lost state, but I’m gradually getting my footing. After spending most of 2011 doing something that I loved (teaching) that was unsustainable (read: unpaid), I started this year back in a public high school – a place I consider my domain – and ended up leaving that path. While that’s a somber fact for me, I’m happy to be where I am now, immersed in academia once again. The people here at Yale have taught me a lot just in these few months, and I’m sure they will continue to do the same. My wife has helped make the transition bearable, and technology has allowed my friends to keep me company and to make me want to improve my academic work as well as my blog-writing. Y’all rock, and I hope you’ll stick around for next year.

Weekend Reading

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Here it is, folks! The last weekend reading of the year!

In lean production, however, the goal isn’t to continuously develop workers’ skills or even improve the quality of their products. What’s continuously improved is the production process itself, and the metric for measuring improvement is efficiency.

Of course, as labor educator Charley Richardson has pointed out, efficiency is not an absolute concept, but is socially defined. Richardson notes, “Coffee breaks, production limits and staffing levels are all designed to improve the production process from a worker perspective and are all inefficiencies from a management perspective.” In a lean workplace, continuous improvement means the elimination of whatever makes the work process humane and tolerable in order to increase production numbers.

Ultimately, both the worker and the product are of minimal importance. Perfecting the labor process by maximizing efficiency, regardless of the collateral damage to worker or product, is the goal. In lean schools, teaching, learning, and student growth become secondary.

Silicon Valley’s countercultural vibe has long masked its Wall Street-style labor discipline: a heavy emphasis on smartness, flexibility, and willingness to work more grueling hours than the guy next to you. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has even confessed to “sneaking” out of the office to have dinner with her family so as not to run afoul of overwrought office cultures. So intense is the work expectation that the biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become a sort of Bible for the aspiringly sleep-deprived…

…this is an impressive absorption of female biology into a reinforcement of the work ethic. Everyone knows that men can work all the time by ignoring their families. But women give birth. They’re natural nurturers. What if they can perform both roles and somehow center motherhood and CEOship? She becomes a superworker, “balancing” two loads too heavy to be borne in any proportion. Women insist that they can “do it all” so as not to appear disadvantaged in comparison to their male colleagues; this scrabbling not to be left behind merely legitimizes the insane work ethic. Women’s desire to break the glass ceiling right under Jobs’s feet — Mayer has referred to him as one of her heroes on Twitter — reinforces the importance of a brutal, dehumanizing schedule. Women can do that too. Only more.

Rejecting the University

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Higher education is in a rocky place, you may have heard. More and more, colleges are placing the burden of cost on their students, raising tuition in astronomical amounts. Increasingly, public colleges are recruiting out-of-state students (who pay higher tuition), abandoning their mandate to educate the citizens of their state at low cost. Departments are absorbing each other – or closing completely – and new PhDs are becoming adjuncts rather than tenured, all while new vice presidents are hired and massive buildings are erected. Colleges are increasingly exclusive and costly, and they are continuing to move away from the purpose of educating young minds.

In the 2006 film Accepted, Bartelby Gaines, a high school graduate who failed to get into eight colleges, decides to start his own fake college to fool his parents. An entrepreneur by nature, he takes the ruse all the way: renting out an abandoned psychiatric hospital to serve as a college facade. The plan blows up as other people apply and end up enrolling in the institution that Gaines decides to run. There are two questions worth exploring when watching this movie: what problems does the film have with academia? And what does it really take to run a college?

Reject rejection – and all the exclusivity, cost, and waste that it symbolizes.

When Bartleby tells his parents he didn’t get into any colleges, he spins it by telling them that it is fiscally irresponsible for him to go to college. “We could spend $80,000 over the next four years, or I could make $80,000 over the next four years.” And it’s true – college is expensive and the cost is difficult to bear for many. Regardless, his parents are irate. “Society has rules,” his father argues, “first rule is you go to college. If you want to have a happy, successful life, you go to college. If you want to be somebody, you go to college. If you want to fit in, you go to college.” College is a social need above all else.

When Bartleby hatches the plan to mail himself a fake admissions letter – to the South Harmon Institute of Technology – he is joined by a cast of conspirators who help him renovate the hospital in preparation for his parents’ visit to school. What ensues is a glimpse into what the film accuses academia of doing wrong – and what the film views as education’s purpose.

When the Gaines family meets with the Dean of the college, a former professor recently fired from a job at the mall, he lambastes the entire notion of higher education. “A lot of people say that college is the time when young men and women expand the way that they look at their world, when they open their minds to new ideas and experiences, and when they begin that long journey from the innocence of youth to the responsibilities of adulthood. Now isn’t that a load of horseshit?”  When pushed on the view, he describes the school’s philosophy: “We throw a lot of fancy words in front of these kids, in order to attract them to go to this school, in the belief that they’re going to have a better life. And we all know that all we’re doing is breeding a whole new generation of buyers and sellers,  pimps and whores, and indoctrinating them into a lifelong hell of debt and indecision.” When the family is left speechless, he continues: “Do I have to spoon-feed it to you? There’s only one reason that kids want to go to school: to get a good job. To get a good job with a great starting salary.”

The uncomfortable silence is, naturally, broken by mom’s comment that it is “so refreshing to hear someone approach education so rationally.”

There’s a rejection of college’s enlightening promise, seeing the process of higher education as merely feeding capitalism.  And the parents gobble it up because that’s how more and more people are viewing education now.  The learning isn’t important, it’s the degree that will give you a well-paying job. It echoes all the parents that harp on their English-major sons and Philosophy-major daughters and praise the niece that’s pre-med or the neighbor’s kid that’s getting an MBA. It’s all around us, and it’s not just our families feeding it to us. Our school administrations and our politicians agree. More and more, university administrators are advocating for more “professional” degrees rather than traditional academic ones. When Florida Governor Rick Scott advocated shifting state funds from humanities and social sciences towards science and technology, he referenced anthropology majors when he argued, “we don’t need them here.” This mentality is everywhere. Even South Harmon’s new fake dean spouts it to degree-hungry parents.

How strange, then, that South Harmon Institute of Technology seemingly rejects the shit out of this notion. When faced with over a hundred newly accepted students later that day, Bartleby chooses not to own up to his lie. Standing before the new students, he bemoans college exclusivity and decries “isn’t it time you’re said ‘yes’ to?” and proceeds to let everyone into his fake college. In the very next scene the President of nearby Harmon College, the region’s elite academy, explains that selectivity and exclusivity are integral to a school’s stature.  While this is traditionally a reference to the admissions process, the President lays out his plan for a physical manifestation of this exclusion: a massive, gentrifying gateway “to keep knowledge in, and ignorance out.” Meanwhile, in order to craft a plan, Bartleby pays a visit to Harmon College to figure out what higher education is supposed to be. The ensuing montage is one of highly structured, stifling curricula, a lack of individuality in massive classrooms, and really goal-oriented, grade-driven students.

Despite his dean’s argument that college was about job-readiness, Bartleby decides to ask the new students what they want to learn. “All of our lives we’ve been told what to learn, well today the tide’s going to turn because today – we’re asking the customer.” This leads to the creation of a whiteboard covered in course ideas, and each student’s tuition is spent predominantly on those subjects. When the love-interest visits, she quickly asks Bartleby, “there aren’t any tests or required reading or any of that nonsense?”

But are tests and required reading really the problem?  When Bartleby tries to steer away from traditional higher education, it results in a broad curriculum taught by the students that relies on experiences rather than grades. No required Ancient Roman history class when you want to be a photographer, no spillover class in front of a speaker, and no recording of every word in case it’s on the test. But higher education was never supposed to be these things anyways. While a basic curriculum should provide some foundation for learning, the stifling major maps of many of today’s colleges are a way of streamlining students to make everything easier for administration. Massive class sizes save school’s money and grading systems quicken the evaluation process. And on top of all of this, the exclusivity of some universities is a part of why they are so expensive. All of this is a result of the commodification of education. It’s this type of education is the kind that treats students as customers.

So when the people at Harmon out Bartleby as a fraud, the crew decides to fight for accreditation  The state defines a college as “a body of people with a shared common purpose of a higher education,” and at the hearing, the board states that a college must have a facility, a curriculum, and a faculty. The facility comes in the form of a mental hospital with a skating ramp, the curriculum is wheeled out in whiteboard-form, and the students identify themselves as faculty (kinda like, you know, grad students).  Bartleby issues a monologue decrying college traditions of hazing outcasts, driving students crazy with stress, and robbing students of creativity. “You don’t need teachers or a classroom to learn,” he argues, “just people with the desire to better themselves.”

When the board votes to allow the school to operate on an experimental basis, the chairman states that “the true purpose of education is to stimulate the creativity and the passions of the student body.”  But what hope does South Harmon have?

South Harmon eschews everything from a proper gymnasium to tenured faculty in establishing its by-the-student-for-the-student model. It succeeds in placing decision-making with those most concerned with the education at hand – the students and the faculty. With students paying into the system with the hopes of learning something in order to better their lives, they ought to have a say in what they do in school. South Harmon makes good on this promise, using tuition funds primarily on the education of students. Today’s universities spend that same money on construction, marketing, losing $23 billion in investments – anything but teaching. Tuition dollars need to go towards education, and at South Harmon they do. At local rival Harmon College, the money is spent on gentrifying the neighborhood for an arch named after the President, by the President.

South Harmon also lacks grades completely. When visiting Harmon, Bartleby saw sleep-deprived students mumbling mnemonics and frantically scribbling down everything the professor says. Note-taking and memory strategies can help you learn, of course, but test-oriented learning isn’t learning at all. Today, education at all levels is obsessed with grades – be it standardized testing or many schools’ unspoken policy or not failing students (lest they ruin the school’s stats). But in classes of hundreds of students, grading a multiple choice test is the only way your SOC-101 teacher is going to decide that you passed. In small classes, where there is more attention paid to each student and more intensive learning rather than test-taking, grades aren’t needed. If the class is small enough, you can see who’s learning and you don’t need grades. If the class is small enough, learning will be happening, and you don’t need to fail people. South Harmon’s classes are all small – except a few lectures from the dean that seem more like a speaker series than a course. Small classes with committed faculty and engaged students mean you don’t need grades. Get rid of large class sizes, get rid of grades. Just like we need to get rid of endless spending on non-educational excess.

Another place where Gaines’ model is absolutely right is the complete lack of administration at the school. Administration is – of course – the most absurd part of higher education today. It’s the source of a host of problems we face today, like stringent curricula, tuition hikes, and lack of academic freedom and it’s the embodiment of the bureaucracy of education that we’re dealing with now. Indeed, my undergraduate years were spent at a state university with a team of over a dozen vice presidents, and I’m currently studying at a school with a dozen more. Faculty and students can run schools, and they should. After all, they’re the ones that higher education is meant to serve. Meanwhile, the effects of administrative-heavy colleges is everywhere, be it the monetary cost of administrative bloat, the disasters of appointed governing boards, or the erosion of faculty governance. And South Harmon soundly rejects its very existence.

It’s not a novel concept that institutions of higher education be run efficiently to better use resources for learning and research. Rather than fund administrative bloat, go on urban construction binges, sign deals with board members’ companies, or profit off of research patents, universities should be funding teaching and research for the public good. Universities used to be run predominantly by the faculty – whose primary concern was research and education – not full-time administrators. In the fictional world of Accepted, it took a team of would-be freshmen to build their own fake school in order to have a college not turned into a money-draining all-administrative body that saw teaching as a means to feed capitalism. What will it take for our universities to throw off the yoke of the administration and reclaim the university for those who use it?

Starbucks as Fiction

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Today, a message from Starbucks President and CEO, Howard Shultz, was posted. That message starts like this:

There are moments in our lives when we have an opportunity to ignite tremendous positive change—not just in the lives of the customers and communities we serve every day, but in our country. This was evident in the outpouring of support in the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary that claimed 26 innocent lives.

And, after citing a tragedy in which a gunman took so many lives, he continues like this:

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the Starbucks tradition of bringing people together, we have a unique opportunity to unite and take action on an incredibly important topic. As many of you know, our elected officials in Washington D.C. have been unable to come together and compromise to solve the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt. You can learn more about this impending crisis at www.fixthedebt.org.

Rather than be bystanders, we have an opportunity—and I believe a responsibility—to use our company’s scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials to come together and reach common ground on this important issue. This week through December 28, partners in our Washington D.C. area stores are writing “Come Together” on customers’ cups.

It’s a small gesture, but the power of small gestures is what Starbucks is about! Imagine the power of our partners and hundreds of thousands of customers each sharing such a simple message, one cup at a time.

This is ridiculous even if you don’t consider the fact that the fiscal cliff is a fake crisis made by politicians, and even if you don’t consider that “fixing the debt” is code for slashing service after service in lieu of raising taxes on rich people – rich people like Howard Shultz. Even if you don’t consider that Fix the Debt, the organization Shultz links to, is run entirely by politicians and corporate executives, and doesn’t care about who is actually affected by austerity policies. Even if you don’t consider the fact that most debt-conscious policies include things like cutting funding to mental health facilities and other social services and not raising taxes on gun purchases or gun manufacturers. Even if you don’t consider that if you’re going to frame your stupid write-notes-on-cups campaign as a response to a shooting, it should at least address things that pertain to the victims. Even if you forget all this and are cracked out on low-wage-blended, fair-trade-marketed coffee, this is ridiculous.

It can’t be real.