3. EVOLUTION, ECOLOGY AND MALIGNANT DESIGN

BY

NOAM CHOMSKY

To proponents, intelligent design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection.

To detractors, intelligent design is creationism — the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis — in a thin guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't understand" as has always been true in the sciences before understanding is reached.

Accordingly, there cannot be a "debate."

The teaching of evolution has long been difficult in the United States. Now, a national movement has emerged to promote the teaching of intelligent design in schools.

The issue has famously surfaced in a courtroom in Dover, Pa., where a school board is requiring students to hear a statement about intelligent design in a biology class — and parents mindful of the U.S. Constitution's church/state separation have sued the board.

In the interest of fairness, perhaps the president's speechwriters should take him seriously when they have him say that schools should be open-minded and teach all points of view.

So far, however, the curriculum has not encompassed one obvious point of view: malignant design. Unlike intelligent design, for which the evidence is zero, malignant design has tons of empirical evidence, much more than Darwinian evolution, by some criteria: the world's cruelty.

Be that as it may, the background of the current evolution/intelligent design controversy is the widespread rejection of science, a phenomenon with deep roots in American history that has been cynically exploited for narrow political gain during the last 25 years.

Intelligent design raises the question of whether it is intelligent to disregard scientific evidence about matters of supreme importance to the nation and the world — like global warming.

An old-fashioned conservative would believe in the value of Enlightenment ideals — rationality, critical analysis, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry — and would try to adapt them to a modern society.

America's Founding Fathers, children of the Enlightenment, championed those ideals and took pains to create a constitution that espoused religious freedom yet separated church and state.

The United States, despite the occasional messianism of its leaders, isn't a theocracy.

In our time, Bush administration hostility to scientific inquiry puts the world at risk.

Environmental catastrophe, whether you think the world has been developing only since Genesis or for eons, is far too serious to ignore.

In preparation for the G8 summit this past summer, the scientific academies of all eight member nations, joined by those of China, India and Brazil, called on the leaders of the rich countries to take urgent action to head off global warming.

"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify prompt action," their statement said. "It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions."

A few months earlier, at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, leading U.S. climate researchers released "the most compelling evidence yet" that human activities are responsible for global warming, according to The Financial Times.

They predicted major climatic effects, including severe reductions in water supplies in regions that rely on rivers fed by melting snow and glaciers.

Other prominent researchers at the session reported evidence that the melting of Arctic and Greenland ice sheets is causing changes in the sea's salinity balance that threaten "to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics toward the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream."

Like the statement of the National Academies for the G8 summit, "the most compelling evidence yet" received scant notice in the United States, despite the attention given in the same days to the implementation of the Kyoto protocols, with the most important government refusing to take part.

It is important to stress "government." The standard report that the United States stands almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase "United States" excludes its population, which strongly favors the Kyoto pact (73 per cent, according to a July poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes).

Perhaps only the word "malignant" could describe a failure to acknowledge, much less address, the all-too-scientific issue of climate change.

Thus, the "moral clarity" of the Bush administration extends to its cavalier attitude toward the fate of our grandchildren.

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4. COUNTER-RECRUITMENT DAY SWEEPS U.S. COLLEGES

BY

MAYA SCHENWAR

When the Solomon Amendment, the law that requires universities to allow military recruiters on campus, first passed in 1995, the bill's co-sponsor Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) declared an intention to "send a message over the wall of the ivory tower of higher education." On December 6, the "ivory tower" will send a message back. In court, the oral argument will be presented for FAIR v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case which will decide the fate of the Solomon Amendment. On the street, thousands of students, teachers and peace activists will participate in the National Day of Counter-Recruitment, holding rallies and educational events in almost every major city. The day of protest, organized by Campus Anti-War Network (CAN) and endorsed by Cindy Sheehan, Howard Zinn and Kathy Kelly, is expected to be the largest student counter-recruitment action organized around the Iraq War to date. [See CAN's website at http://www.campusantiwar.net for detailed information and a full list of endorsers.]

"A military that is an unequal employer and that funnels people into an immoral war should not be able to recruit on campus," said Ian Chinich, a member of Rutgers Anti-War and an organizer of the December 6 protest. "We hope that the public and the anti-war movement realize that counter-recruitment is one of the most effective strategies for fighting against the war and is also a moral imperative." 

Yet the Solomon Amendment now curbs most counter-recruiting efforts: schools that prohibit recruiters or do not provide them with "equal access" to campus are denied all federal funding. In 2002, the law was toughened, so that even if only one department of a university-for example, its law school-bars recruiters from campus, all federal funds are withheld, including critical money for medical and psychological research that the nation depends on. 

Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), a national organization of law schools that is serving as the plaintiff in the case against the Solomon Amendment, argues that the mandate to allow recruiters on campus violates universities' constitutional right to freedom of speech. 

"Just as civil rights advocates have a First Amendment right to boycott a racist business, law schools have a First Amendment right to boycott discriminatory employers," said Joshua Rosencrantz, one of FAIR's attorneys, who calls the Solomon legislation a violation of schools' right to freedom from compelled speech. He also cites a freedom of association violation: the Solomon Amendment attempts to control the people and organizations with whom universities ally themselves. 

Though the parties challenging the Solomon Amendment in court oppose recruiters mainly for their discriminatory policies, the organizers of the December 6 day of protest also oppose them on anti-war grounds. The Solomon Amendment makes the military's messages of violence a mandatory part of students' college experience, says Counter-Recruitment Day endorser Kathy Kelly, who coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence in Chicago. 

"It is foolish and dangerous to rule that U.S. education facilities must instill military culture and the solutions pursued by the U.S. military in every institution of higher learning," Kelly said. 

Counter-Recruitment Day organizers also hold that military recruiters use deceptive, manipulative strategies to convince students to enlist. The recruitment drive is aimed primarily at lower-income Americans, says Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an NYU student and a head organizer with CAN. 

"Recruiters take advantage of the inequality and segregation of this country, in which a whole segment of society is written off, and hold up joining the military as a way out," Wrigley-Field said. 

According to a recent CAN report, recruiters often lead students to believe that joining the military will enable them to pay for a college education. Yet only 15 percent of soldiers complete a college degree, and less than 10 percent use Army funds to do so. In terms of job training-another promise the military makes to new recruits-an American Friends Service Committee report notes that veterans earn 11 to 19 percent less than non-veterans with similar backgrounds. 

"It's very sad to realize that young people graduate from colleges loaded up with loans to repay and that one of the only means to get assistance with education is to enlist in the military," Kelly said. "How much wiser it would be if U.S. wealth and productivity could be directed toward assisting young people, with no requirement to join the military; to learn languages, learn skills desperately needed in third world countries, and learn the basics of community development." 

Counter-recruitment, then, is not simply about getting recruiters out of the schools: it's about presenting young people with alternatives to enlisting. Many of the Counter-Recruitment Day actions will involve direct protests staged at recruiting stations, in which protestors will distribute information to potential recruits. The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, an endorser of the December 6 protests and a key player in the counter-recruitment movement, councils prospective recruits in the dangers of military involvement, non-military ways to finance college and alternative service learning opportunities. 

In the past couple of months, the counter-recruitment movement has seen a string of successes. Sixty percent of voters in San Francisco approved a proposition last month to kick recruiters off campuses and fund non-military scholarships. The first national student-organized anti-recruitment day, Not Your Soldier Day of Action, rocked 40 campuses on November 17. As the verdict on FAIR v. Rumsfeld draws closer, activists are crossing their fingers for another victory, hoping that if given the chance, schools will say no to recruiters on campus. 

"The majority is with us in opposing the war and military recruitment," Wrigley-Field said. "It's time to get that majority organized to get recruiters out of our schools." 

To find out about National Counter-Recruitment Day events near you, see www.campusantiwar.net

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5. WHERE POLITICS AND HIP HOP COLLIDE

BY

MARIA LUISA TUCKER

Last Monday night, Kwame Kilpatrick went on a club crawl of Detroit's liveliest bars and nightclubs. On Tuesday night, the 35-year-old African American ex-football player partied again until the early hours of the morning, this time at an election party. He was celebrating his own victory. Kilpatrick, America's first "hip hop mayor," had won a second term in office.

Despite a first term riddled with "youthful" mistakes -- most famously he admitted using city dollars to lease a Lincoln Navigator for his wife -- Kilpatrick was resilient. He relied on his base of young African-Americans, a risky bet since young people have notoriously low voter turnout rates. But as the youngest mayor ever elected in Detroit and a member of the so-called "hip hop generation," he pulled it off.

The hip hop generation that Kilpatrick belongs to is defined loosely as minorities born between 1965 and 1984 who have grown up within a culture of hip hop music, dance, fashion and art. They are the first generation born in a post-Jim Crow society, and were raised largely in urban neighborhoods that have exemplified both the successes and ironies of the civil rights movement.

Even with legal equality, schools remained largely segregated. Despite an ever increasing black middle class, black and brown people remained over-represented among the ranks of the poor and unemployed. As the hip hop generation has come of age, many of its members have reacted to these realities by forming or participating in an array of social justice organizations. Only a few have gotten involved in electoral politics; Kilpatrick was elected in 2001, and poet and hip hop activist Ras Baraka was appointed Newark's deputy mayor in 2002 after an earlier unsuccessful run for mayor.

Like Kilpatrick himself, hip hop's growing presence in electoral politics has shown itself to be controversial, awkwardly unpredictable -- and incredibly charismatic. In 2004, it was not clear if the highly publicized hip hop voter registration drives, such as Sean "P. Diddy" Comb's "Vote or Die!" campaign (in which Kilpatrick participated), marked the beginning of a political movement, or simply a trend during a dramatic election year. A year later, it seems that hip hop's place in politics is continuing to grow. The collaborations and organizations that sprung up from the 2004 election are, for the most part, stronger than ever. If a national hip hop political movement was in its infancy last year, then this year it's beginning its uncomfortable adolescence.

"The election was really important. It was really the first time you saw this sort of effort on both the celebrity level and the grassroots level that came together around one big thing," says Jeff Chang, hip hop journalist and author of Can't Stop, Won't Stop. But he likens the trajectory of the hip hop's political movement to entropy--it tends toward disorder and randomness. "The hip hop political movement is not something that has a monolithic look to it. You're talking about folks working day in and day out on a range of issues. What unites them is the fact that there has been massive generational change since the civil rights movement. The question is, how to do you harness something that looks like entropy?"

It's a good question with about a million answers. As a political movement, hip hop is finding itself and just about everything is up for debate: who its leaders should be, who the movement represents, and how to harmonize hip hop's historical resistance against the establishment with a new urge to participate in mainstream politics. The people who made 2004 such a big year for hip hop are, in 2005, proposing very different ways to carry forward.

The Grassroots Organizers

"Hip hop has always been political," says Rosa Clemente, a New York-based activist and co-host for WBAI's (99.5 FM/NYC) show, "Where We Live." "Hip hop can be used to show resistance against oppression; that's what it was in the beginning and that's what it continues to be."

Since its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has certainly welcomed lyrics about oppression, resistance to the white establishment, and blunt challenges to government, from N.W.A.'s hit "Fuck Tha Police" in 1988, to Jadakiss' 2004 song "Why?" which asked "Why did Bush knock down the towers." With a history of Afro-centric nationalism, gangsta rap and graffiti art, hip hop had never been used as a means of assimilation into mainstream (white) culture. It has always been more likely to dismiss electoral politics in favor of localized social justice work.

Clemente, who identifies herself as a black Puerto Rican grassroots organizer, was part of the surge in the 1990s of activists who tied their social justice work closely to hip hop culture. Her professional history could be easily mistaken for notes on hip hop's political agenda. She has tackled issues including youth organizing, prison rights, African-American/Latino relations, racism in South Africa, and ethnic disparities in health care. On the roster of larger organizations she's affiliated with is the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which was founded in Brooklyn in 1993 to focus on self-determination and community building. Through its Central Brooklyn Cop Watch and Political Prisoner Amnesty Campaign, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement also deals with two ever-present issues for African-Americans and Latinos: police brutality and discrimination in the criminal justice system. For Clemente, the key word when it comes to hip hop's political future is self-determination.

"We need to talk about building an independent party, not just joining the Green Party or the Working Families Party. People of color need to build their own political party," she says. "I'm no longer interested in dealing with progressives when they don't allow leadership to look like people of color." While white progressives may focus on social justice just as hip hop activists do, the differences have a lot to do with age, ethnicity and class. "[White progressives and liberals] will protest the war in Iraq, but they will not step in when they see cops harassing a black person in their neighborhood."

While Clemente's dream of a national independent party has yet to grow roots, for more than a decade organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement have left their stamp on their local communities. On the West Coast, for instance, an organization called Youth Speaks has introduced spoken word poetry into high schools, colleges and juvenile detention centers in the Bay Area. On the East Coast, the Prison Moratorium Project in 2001 helped prevent New York City from spending $64 million to expand its juvenile detention jails and urged local officials to use that money for community youth programs. These are just two small examples of the hundreds of organizations that have made their imprint on school board issues, city council decisions and state propositions and laws.

As these types of organizations have worked locally over the years, the stage has slowly been set for hip hop to make its presence felt in national electoral politics. Many local organizations have expanded to include chapters across the nation, or joined their efforts with political groups like The League of Pissed Off Voters, which is directed by 31-year-old William "Upski" Wimsatt, co-editor of How to Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office and author of Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons.

New organizations like the Hip Hop Caucus, the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the Hip Hop Summit Action Network have been formed exclusively to build a national presence. Meanwhile, hip hop's celebrities have gone into the business of national voter registration drives, first in 2000 with Rap the Vote (a spin off of MTV's Rock the Vote), then last year with P. Diddy's "Vote or Die!" and Russell Simmons' Hip Hop Summits. This has been to the dismay of some activists like Clemente, who says, "Russell and P. Diddy are hip hop capitalists, not hip hop activists!"

The Celebrities

Among the many efforts by hip hop organizations focused on the 2004 election, Russell Simmons' Hip Hop Summits received a lion's share of media attention. In the search for easily identifiable black leaders, the mainstream media latched on to Simmons, a 48-year-old millionaire and the founder of Def Jam Records and Phat Farm brand. Simmons is the chairman and founder of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), which at its start in 2000 acted more like a trade organization. Among its first actions were the creation of parental advisory labeling for CDs and a mentoring program for newly signed rappers. The organization was shaped into social force with a resolution to assist in the "political empowerment of the hip hop community."

By forming alliances between the most powerful businessmen in the industry and the largest civil rights organizations -- including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Nation of Islam -- HSAN instantly established itself as a leader in the African-American community.

Of course, most of the nation knows HSAN for its 26 star-studded summits, which were held across the nation. The star power of the summits enticed millions of people to attend, and ultimately 2 million young people registered to vote through HSAN. Dozens of rappers made appearances, including Reverend Run of Run-DMC, Kanye West, P. Diddy, Beyonce, Lil' Romeo, Eminem, Busta Rhymes and Erykah Badu. Political figures also made appearances, of course, and provided voter education. They, however, were not the stars of the show.

Dr. Benjamin Chavis, HSAN's 57-year-old CEO, estimates that 1.3 million people who registered to vote through the HSAN actually went to the polls and voted. (For people under 30, the total vote was more than 11 million.) Those figures are backed by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which reported that "youth voter turnout increased substantially and much of this increase was driven by an increase in voting among African-American youth."

The election proves that "there are political consequences to hip hop," according to Chavis. "It would be wrong to say that hip hop is just concerned with bling bling, or hip hop is just music, or it's just fashion, or that it's just political. People try to put hip hop in one category, but it is multi-faceted. It's a global youth phenomenon with the ability to affect political change." Over the next couple years, HSAN has dropped out of hardcore politicking and is focusing on a program to promote financial literacy. Chavis says its voter registration program "Team Vote" is still active and will be kicked back into high gear for the 2008 presidential elections.

As anyone with a television knows, HSAN is not hip hop's only celebrity-led political organization. P. Diddy's "Vote or Die!" campaign, founded just four months before the election, sought to make voting "hot, sexy and relevant." More of a media blitz than a part of a movement, "Vote or Die!" got celebrity endorsements from Mary J. Blige, Paris Hilton, 50 Cent, Mya and others. However, after the election, it was reported that neither Paris Hilton nor 50 Cent had actually voted, or even registered to vote. It's not clear whether the campaign followed up to estimate how many of its new voters actually made it to the polls. The website has not been updated since 2004, and its phone numbers were no longer in service.

This type of sloppy follow-through has some activists steaming and invites outside criticism. "To have voter registration drives and not educate people about the issues is criminal to me," says Clemente. "That's why we are in the situation we are in now, with the Bush regime the second time around."

The Divide

Throughout the election year, both the mainstream media and some grassroots activists criticized celebrity-driven hip hop organizations as sometimes hypocritical in their politics, less than revolutionary, and short-sighted. To be sure, HSAN and "Vote or Die!" were not the heavyweights of voter education. This was most apparent by the faces that fronted the voting campaigns -- artists, not organizers, who were sometimes ignorant about the political issues of the 2004 election.

The New York Times called P. Diddy's campaign "insincere marketing" and made fun of the "trendy T-shirts" that were passed out to newly registered voters. The Boston Globe noted that at a summit in Bean town, Sen. Maxine Waters received "polite applause" from the crowd while musician Lloyd Banks was greeted with "near hysterics." A San Francisco Chronicle writer made fun of HSAN's goal of eliminating poverty, asking "How does that work, if what most mainstream rappers represent is part of the problem in eliminating poverty?"

"Some of the contentiousness is only natural, hip hop is evolving as a cultural phenomenon," says Chavis. "But we have never said that participating in the political process is the only way to make a change." Chavis notes that HSAN is "very grassroots" and works in collaboration with numerous other grassroots organizations to carry out its work. "If there is a divide, it's between those that consider themselves hip hop activists and those who consider themselves only involved in the music, fashion, and culture of hip hop. But that is changing. You see Talib Kweli, Common, and other rappers getting involved." Theoretically, then, more hip hop consumers will follow in their footsteps.

Despite whatever tensions exist, at least one organization has managed to bring together both celebrities and the activists who are skeptical of them: the biannual National Hip-Hop Political Convention, a national organization operating in 20 states. The first convention in 2004 was organized by people submerged in the social justice work of hip hop culture, including Jeff Chang, Rosa Clemente, Newark Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka, and Bakari Kitwana, former editor of the Source magazine and author of The Hip Hop Generation.

Grassroots organizers were joined by a handful of celebrities. Together, about 400 delegates from around the nation, including representatives from organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Black Panther Party, created a hip hop agenda. It focused on education, economic justice, criminal justice, health and human rights and specifically called for better funding for public schools, free college education, reparations, full employment, voting rights for ex-cons, universal healthcare, funding for AIDS prevention/research, and withdrawal of troops from occupied nations.

The next National Hip-Hop Political Convention, planned for July 2006 in Chicago, promises to strengthen the national infrastructure. If it is anything like the first one, Russell Simmons, wealthy rap stars and neighborhood activists will be brainstorming together. Meanwhile, individual chapters have gotten involved in local elections. The New York chapter, for example, held a mayoral election town hall on Nov. 3.

For a movement that has many divisions, the agenda put together by the National Hip-Hop Political Convention sounds surprisingly similar to the goals expressed repeatedly by other hip hop organizations. The mission statements of HSAN and nearly all organizations that consider themselves part of the hip hop political movement are working toward similar causes: better public education, economic justice, equal and universal healthcare, reparations, racial equality in the criminal justice system, prisoners' rights, and education through the arts. Despite divisions on methodology -- some want to reform, others want revolution -- hip hop's political movement has a pretty solid focus on social justice for historically oppressed people.

As for the blurry edges of the emerging movement, Chavis is optimistic. "Hip hop transcends race and ethnicity. There is room for everybody," he says. "There are some people in the academic world who consider themselves hip hop academics and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. You can be a hip hop scientist, a hip hop doctor."

Clemente has some stipulations to an open door policy: "White people can join in if they are willing to support and take leadership from people of color."

To be effective politically, hip hop's activists and celebrities do not necessarily have to adhere to one set of values. "A movement takes all kinds of different fronts, and that's something that people in the left don't appreciate," Jeff Chang says. "In the right, they figure out a way to include cultural conservatives, evangelicals, corporate folks and they put it together in a movement. In the left, we've had a lot of issues over the years with partisanship and ideological division. This is a chance to unite people."

The Future

Now, a year removed from the mania of the Bush-Kerry presidential election, it seems that hip hop's venture into national politics has, at a minimum, begun to affect the way voting blocs are imagined. While white voters are largely defined by their lifestyle during campaigns -- the so-called "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads" -- minority voters are usually defined by their race. They are viewed by candidates as two monolithic groupings: the black vote and the Latino vote. But in 2004, the hip hop vote emerged, both as a testament to the impact of popular culture on politics and an assertion of self-identification. For the next presidential election, it will be hard to ignore this new voting bloc.

As for Kilpatrick's win in Detroit, Chang cautions against reading too much into it. "Kwame Kilpatrick didn't have much of a presence at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention. When Ras Baraka runs for office next year, that will be more of an indicator, because he was the chair of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and he has more of a decided bent toward the kind of issues at the convention. That will be more of a litmus test for the hip hop community."

Meanwhile, antagonisms about authenticity, class and methodology of the movement will surely continue to play out. The one thing that is in agreement is the potential power of hip hop to shape national politics.

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